Since late February 2020, the team at Avvio have been tracking the impact the COVID-19 Coronavirus has had on online search across the hospitality industry. We want to ensure that when the upturn starts and the appetite for travel resumes, we are fully prepared and ready to help our customers.
Understandably, all ‘hospitality’ related searches have seen a downward trend since March 2020 when hotels were advised to close after governmental lockdown measures were implemented. When hotels and accommodation providers started closing, the natural inclination was to switch off all paid search campaigns in a bid to preserve precious marketing budgets. We understand the desire to switch off all campaigns, however, we do advise (where possible) keeping a very small budget in place for brand campaigns to protect your hotel’s brand positioning.
We are closely monitoring booking and search trends along with gauging traffic intent on websites to better understand and know when the right time is to turn paid search back on.
Despite a substantial decrease in search volume since January, trends (while low) seem to be relatively consistent across all locations.
We’ve segmented search trends by major locations to get a better insight into global sentiment:
England
Ireland
Europe
USA
We’ve also looked at the traffic around search terms like ‘When can I travel again’ and ‘When is it safe to travel’. Here are some interesting insights we gathered:
When can I travel again?
Regions with the highest interest towards this keyword:
1. Ireland
2. New Zealand
3. United Kingdom
When is safe to travel:
Regions with the highest interest towards this keyword:
1. United States
2. United Kingdom
3. Australia
When can I book a holiday?
When will hotels reopen?
Now is not the time to switch on all your PPC campaigns, but that doesn’t mean you need to abandon all your digital efforts! Organic search is a major source of revenue and one that can be focused on during the down-turn. Here is a list of digital activities that you can focus on to ensure your website is future-proofed.
In addition to the above analysis, we’ve also been running a weekly survey to gain a better understanding of consumer sentiment towards travel in 2020. The results are optimistic, with *72% of respondents indicating that they want to travel domestically in 2020.
Confidence in international travel however has been further eroded with only 39% of respondents wanting to travel abroad in 2020. A recent survey by Dollar Flight Club supports our research, saying ‘45% of U.S. travelers still have trips planned for the second half of 2020’
For more information on the above, please visit: https://www.avvio.com/coronavirus/survey-results/
