Travel Insights with Google – Helpful Insights and Tools For The Travel Industry
Have you heard of Google’s new product, Travel Insights With Google?
It's with bated breath that the travel industry watches the progress of the global vaccine rollout and monitors countries’ plans to reopen to tourists. With Israel at the forefront of fully vaccinated citizens and Chile not far behind, the wheels are in motion for tourism rejuvenation.
But, travel industry recovery will come with its own challenges, as countries rebound at different paces and with different traveler requirements.
Ruling out the hearsay and staying on top of ever-evolving regulations will become points of focus for tourism providers. By monitoring the rebound, you'll give your company the data and sitemaps to plan for revival in your respective markets.
In this article, we'll share our insights on how to keep track of the progress in real-time as well as point you to the tools to do it.
Six Ways To Track Travel Industry Recovery
1. Monitor The Markets That Are Important To Your Business
Take the time to analyze your market at a micro level, whether it be global or local. You will need to know about the travel restrictions, regulations, and vaccine rollout status in the following locations:
First is the country where your business is located.
Second is the country where your tours or trips are held.
Last up are the countries where your travelers originate from.
With this information, you can create a comprehensive list of all the countries that play a vital role in your ability to host travelers and sell your products.
Keep a close eye on these destinations as it will help you figure out when is the right time to move ahead with your plans.
A comprehensive tool to do this is the UNWTO’s free Tourism Recovery Tracker, which provides a dashboard with the latest general information to track industry recovery.
2. Keep Up With Travel Restrictions and Border Closures
Every country has its own rules and regulations regarding who can enter, if tourism is operational, and what kind of quarantine measures are required.
Travel Bans is an incredible resource to monitor regularly updated information regarding each country's restrictions and more.
It offers the following information breakdown:
- If the country is open to citizens or foreigners
- What degree the country is available for tourism
- What quarantine measures are in place
It also offers airline updates on which airlines are traveling to and from that country. It details what the full restrictions involve, including flight restrictions.
Finally, it outlines information about which countries are open to arrival and what documentation is needed to enter.
There is also IATA’s COVID-19 Travel Regulations Map. It is updated regularly and provides data around flight status, country entry and quarantine requirements, as well as other relevant general information.
A third site to draw comparisons and insights from around countries' opening status and entry requirements based on a place of origin is Kayak.
3. Analyze Immunization Rates Per Country
Many countries are now trying to develop herd immunity within their society to ensure the safety of citizens and safely open their borders.
Herd immunity is established when a large percentage of the population has immunity against the disease, in this case, Covid-19.
At the moment, no one country has managed to achieve this milestone. However, by tracking progress, you may be able to anticipate country openings better.
You can use Our World in Data to analyze vaccine statistics in real-time, depending on whichever location you're interested in.
You'll see how many doses are administered per 100 people in a day, as well as the growing percentages of people with one dose or fully vaccinated titles.
4. Create A Flight Volume Comparison
One of the first consequences of the pandemic was airport closures. Inbound and outbound travel was limited to returning citizens, residents, and the odd work permit holder.
To thoroughly gauge whether a country's tourism sector is ready to operate again, you'll need to monitor flight volumes. If you can determine free-flowing air travel to and from a destination, tourism may be returning.
OAG is a helpful source of data to collect and compare flight volumes over the last three years.
The site is regularly updated and provides a week-on-week analysis of seat capacity in specific destinations.
5. Check Accommodation Booking Rates and Rentals
Another helpful insight into travel recovery comes from hotels and attraction booking volumes.
Sojern has a variety of charts that offer comparative data from 2019 to 2021. These charts can be adjusted to certain regions and show you monthly statistical comparisons for each year.
If you would like to monitor the amount of hotel, attraction, or flight bookings, per region, this is a good tool to use. Based on whether volumes increase or decrease in a specific area, it will be easier to plan ahead for possible tourism.
AirDNA is a tool for short-term rental data collection. You’ll receive data by region according to the number of short-term rental bookings that have been made. This could be valuable to your company if you’re looking to understand domestic travel market recovery trends in your area.
6. Understand Travel Sentiment
As a final action to monitoring travel industry recovery in your market, you’ll want to focus on the traveler’s psyche.
TCI is a Travel Data Intelligence Agency that uses advanced social listening-based techniques to understand the sentiments around travel and destinations based on web conversations.
They found that in 2020 alone, people from 150 unique countries had over 660 million web conversations about travel.
TCI has done all the hard work by analyzing the tone and the degree of negative and positive comments about countries and particular destinations. Their data gives insights into how these travel and tourism-related conversations affect the overall reputation of the tourism sector.
This is a unique tool that can assist your company in understanding how people from all walks of life feel about travel and tourism in the current climate. With this knowledge, you’ll have more of a grasp on what the general tone is and can prepare for reopening accordingly.
Closing Thoughts
Most of these tools and resources form part of the United Nations World Tourism Organization’s tracker. We hope the article has given you more insight on how to use the information you can get from them.
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