Monitor travel demand more accurately with Google’s new Hotel Insights feature
Hotel Insights is part of Google’s new Travel Insights toolkit, tracking the latest traveldemands and interests for specific locations. With Hotel Insights, you can instantly comparesearch volumes for places to stay in your target areas – without other location queriesdiluting the data.
This gives hoteliers and other travel brands reliable insights into how much travel demandexists in destinations at any given time.
What is Google’s Hotel Insights tool?
Hotel Insights is a free online tool that shows search interest for hotels and accommodation in your area. You can use the tool to track demand for hotels in your business locations and see how much interest is coming from domestic and international travellers.
Google specifies three main purposes for the tool:
1. Explore market insights: See when interest in your area rises and where newguests are coming from to make sure you’re always targeting the right audience.
2. Reach more guests: Make it easier for people to find your rooms by building a stronger digital presence.
3. Turn searches into bookings: Find tools to improve your online experience,including guides, articles and valuable tips.Above all, the tool is designed to provide comparative insights for measuring travel demandin specific areas, making it easier to track peaks and declines in travel interest.
What can you learn in the Google Hotel Insights tool?
Destination overview
The Destination overview provides two main insights for your target location. First, you'vegot a graph showing interest in your location over the past 12-week period for the previousthree years. The graph plots Google Search data for hotel and other accommodationsearches in your area, helping you to identify changes in demand levels.
Next, you’ve got a bar chart showing how much of this demand is coming from domestic vs international travellers.
Global insights
The Global Insights page provides more detail about your domestic and international audiences. It shows where the majority of searches are taking place in your home country and overseas.
For Greater London, it tells us that 50% of all domestic searches were conducted in England during the past 12 weeks. Internationally, it also shows 17% of searches took place in Europe and 24% from the rest of the world.
Further down the page, the tool plots two more graphs showing search interest levels during the past 12 weeks over the previous three years. The first graph plots search volumes for the domestic market and the second does the same for international searches.
Scroll past these graphs and the tool lists your top five search markets and you can click the Load more button to reveal more markets. Below this, you’ll find a global map plotting out your top search markets and you can hover over markets to reveal changes in search interest. Finally, at the bottom of the Global Insights page, you’ll find a couple of links – the first pointing you towards Google Hotel Ads for driving more bookings and the second one simply leads to the Resources section of the Hotel Insights tool.
Resources
Google’s Hotel Insights tool includes three batches of resources to help you reach and convert more travellers.
1. Show people where you are and what you can offer: Get your accommodation seen by the right travellers online, and start showing up whenever they need a place to stay.
2. Provide a 5-star website experience: See where your website could be improved and create an experience that people come back to again and again.
3. Get more guests through your doors: Learn how to reach the right travellers at the right moment and turn lookers into bookers.
Each batch includes guides and articles to help you promote your rooms at each stage of the search and booking cycle. For example, the “Show people where you are and what you can offer” section includes four resources.
The first guide shows you how to create a stronger online presence for your hotel using Google Business Profile. Next, you’ve got three articles – the first explaining how to get more reviews from guests, the second how to attract more guests from Google Maps and the final one covering the basics of building a hotel website that converts. Once you’ve got the basics covered, the “Provide a 5-star website experience” section delves into more advanced strategies for converting visitors into bookings.
Get accurate travel demand insightsGoogle’s Hotel Insights tool segments search data to only include queries searching for hotel rooms and other types of short-term accommodation. By filtering out all other location queries – namely non-travel searches – the tool can provide a more accurate picture of genuine travel demand for any given location. While the tool is limited in scope, the relevance of its insights is crucial for hoteliers and other travel brands that need accurate demand insights. So, if you’re not already using HotelInsights to track travel demand for your target locations, now is the time to start.
Need help getting more hotel bookings?
We are a search marketing agency that helps hospitality brands get found online and drive more bookings through their website. Learn more about us at www.vertical-leap.uk or contact us on 02392 830281 to chat to one of the team
