Dear WuBookers, among the various hospitality marketing tools developed by Google, there is also Google Destination Insights: a platform open to all, designed to provide important information to those working in the Travel industry, including hotels.

Let’s see what it is and how it integrates with the Mountain View giant’s other sections.  

What is Destination Insights

Destination Insights is a platform that allows anyone to view the latest “trends related to global travel demand with hard data updated daily.” In fact, the statistics provided by Google are based on its extensive database of searches, users’ demonstrated interest in flights and accommodations, and reservations made.

Through a series of parameters and filters, it is possible to obtain an up-to-date and detailed overview of travel demand trends over time and use it to your advantage.

3 key information you can glean from Destination Insights

Using Destination Insights is quite simple and allows you to derive 3 key pieces of information for those working in the hospitality field: 

• trends over time and the growth of individual destination cities; 
• the origin of potential incoming tourists, or what Google calls “Origin of Demand.”  
• Major cities of the greatest interest.

In fact, thanks to the different filters on the page, it is possible to set your search by “Travel demand for a specific country” or “Flight and accommodation demand data compared.” In the former case, you analyze the details of the country of interest, while in the latter you can compare the performance of different countries.

Suppose we have a hotel property in Italy, how do we get specific data?

We stay on the first tab and select Italy in the list of destination countries. Let’s set the category to “Accommodation” and define the reference time window (applicable up to 5 days before today’s date). In this way, we will have an initial set of data on international tourist demand in the given period, the most popular and growing cities, and the main countries of origin of the demand. 

This is all information that we can further narrow down if we wish. For example, we can set a single country instead of “Whole World” in the “Country of Origin” filter (perhaps to delve into specific source areas of inbound demand) or we can limit the “Type of Travel” from “International” to “Domestic” to distinguish between global and local demand. Again: by choosing the same country as origin and destination, it is even possible to analyze the situation of individual regions. 

Moreover, by cross-referencing this data with that offered by Google Trends (another free Google tool on major online trends), we can go even more into the details of travel searches: we can, for example, decide to test the results by property name so as to assess its notoriety by geographic area.

How to use Google Destination Insights for your marketing strategy

The advantages of Destination Insights, as we have mentioned, consist in being able to have at any time updated data practically in real time, having a reliable projection on demand and its evolution. But how do you translate these statistics into concrete actions that benefit your marketing strategy?

The first way comes directly from reading the trends of patterns and interest. Knowing the behavior of online demand – even compared to the same period in the previous year – can provide useful insights for better planning customer flows, understanding which seasonality is most profitable, and modulating supply in a way that is convenient for the property.

This also provides an important benchmark for evaluating one’s own performance over the same period: comparing hotel reservation data with the general data tracked by Google can serve to identify any discrepancies and, therefore, untapped opportunities.

The growing and most acclaimed locations are essential data for hotel chains and thus can focus more on promoting one or the other. However, it is also valuable information for smaller properties that are in close proximity to those same destinations. These can, for example, start working on user interests with content strategies.

Indeed, social and especially hotel blogs can intercept travelers’ searches and curiosities, offering useful tips, guides and insights about the city, its attractions, typical cuisine and so on. 

Geographic origin is also a relevant element because it allows us to target investments in the most effective way. Knowing what the potential markets are, you can in fact better target your paid campaigns, for example with geo-localized sponsorships, ads designed for a specific geographic target and budgets proportioned accordingly. Depending on variations over time, we can then adapt our activities, optimizing economic efforts and maximizing results as much as possible. 

Not only that, international demand also corresponds to the need to communicate in different languages – an important indication when deciding, for example, how many and which languages to translate the website into.

Other Google tools that are useful to know

As anticipated, Google Destination Insights is not the only product Google makes available to hospitality operators.

Not to be confused with Destination, Travel Analytics Center is available only to Google’s business partners and provides even more timely details on the types, timing, and duration of stays, daily trends in accommodation requests, and the advance of searches over the period of stay sought. 

Valuable information that can be used to make business on Google Hotel Ads even more profitable. In fact, the platform allows hoteliers – as well as B&B and vacation home owners – to post paid and free link ads on Google’s metasearch, thus avoiding the intermediation fees typical of OTAs.

To do this, simply lean on a connectivity partner that allows the property to connect to Google, moreover ensuring that reservations from that channel are also properly recorded on the hotel calendar. WuBook is among them, and – for everything to work – all that is needed is to configure the Google channel within Zak, the hotel management software.

Tourism demand is evolving fast, and Google can offer very powerful analytical and marketing tools – why not take advantage of them?