The change in hotel search – more stats and facts

Following our article “The change in hotel search“, we wanted to give some more information about the search trends and show more stats facts etc.

The data is based on these tools:

• Google Keywords Tools (for search volumes, this data changes monthly it’s only an idea)
• Google Insight for Search (gives search trends)

Search categories

Hotel Search: 35% for hotel type, 5% for hotel review, 60% for hotel location

We’ve use the Keywords Tools to find the most searched keywords when looking for the keyword “hotel“. Here are the results :

• Interesting points:
• 35% of hotel broad search is for hotel type.
• 5% of hotel broad search is for hotel review, it shows that guests search for reviews on specific sites or by typing a longer search query such as hotel [name] reviews.
• 60% of hotel broad search is for hotel locations.

Hotel Search trends:

Now let’s look at the search trends from Google Insight for Search.

london hotel	hotel in paris	hotels cheap
new york hotel	budget hotels	spa hotel
airport hotels	boutique hotel	rome hotel
hotel reviews	luxury hotels	las vegas hotel
hotel deals	hotel in dubai	berlin hotels
5 star hotels	madrid hotel	rio hotel
hotel singapore	miami hotel

Except for the “Spa hotel” which has a slight increase and “Boutique Hotel” which is growing fast, the 18 other keywords are decreasing.

The following stats do not represent trafic volume of the website, they only represent the Brand awareness of the website from the internet users

Now let’s have a look at the main hotel collections / affiliate brands:

designhotels.com	slh.com	preferred hotel
mrandmrssmith.com	splendia.com	routard.com

We can see they had a boost when they launched their collections. But year after year, they’re going down like the generic keywords above.

From what we’ve observe in our previous post, booking.com and priceline.com where growing very fast. So let’s have a look on all the main OTAs on the web right now :

booking.com	expedia.com	venere.com
travelocity.com	orbitz.com	lastminute.com
hrs.com	smartertravel.com	priceline.com

Same results here. Except booking.com which getting more and more search every years, all the other OTA are loosing search volume (this doesn’t include people typing the exact url in the search bar). So which Brand are actually the ones guests choose to find their hotels ?

tripadvisor	trivago	wego
kayak	holidaycheck	hotelscombined

Conclusion :

Guests are more and more educated in price shopping online and are moving towards rate comparison sites (which in turn bring traffic to OTAs). While this isn’t something new it clearly shows that hotels need to be listed on these sites if they want to be found by guests and future guests.