Google top ten destinations

Well it that time of the year when everybody reviews everything and Google of course is what most of us use to review the reviews. I am no exception and this evening I thought it time to visit the always inspiring (and sometimes depressing) Google Zeitgeist (see below). While doing so I had a quick look at some of the data specific to Spain and most interestingly the list of the top ten tourism destinations searched. Fittingly in Olympic year London won the gold medal ahead of other European cities such as Paris (2nd) and Berlin (9th). Congratulations are in order for Mexico for coming in third and to Turkey for a very respectable 6th. Israel too has had a good year for the Spanish market, at least until the last couple of months. I am a little confused by San Francisco being the fourth most searched for tourist destination in Spain in 2012. And this makes me wonder if google sell “sponsored links” in this list too.

The full list is as follows so I’ll let you draw your own conclusions before enjoying the video and getting back to work on next years budget.

1. London

2. Paris

3. Mexico

4. San Francisco

5 Barcelona

6. Turkey

7. Israel

8. Berlin

9. Los Angeles

10. Madrid

Lookinside.travel 2011 and the dreaded “Commoditization”

Today I was at the presentation of the Lookinside.travel survey for 2011. I have mentioned this survey in previous posts, as it is an extremely useful tool for anyone interested in understanding the Spanish traveller…or at least the Spanish traveller according to Google.

The initiative, by Google and in partnership with Exceltur, the government statistics office and a large number of private companies is not only commendable for its usefulness but also for its generosity. At last year’s presentation we got a neat USB stick with the executive summary of the survey on the way out but, alas, this year they weren’t quite as generous. So I’ll read the actual survey as soon as I can get a copy and report back here. In the meantime I thought I would share a couple of the highlights from today’s event that will not be in the report itself:

The Lookinside.travel survey claims to be “a survey on information and purchasing habits of the Spanish traveller”. If I had to sum up today’s traveller according to this survey in one word it would undoubtedly be: Commoditization. A strange choice, you might say, and not even an adjective but it is the fad in the trade today and I think every single speaker used it at least once (or at least they tried to use it because it is almost impossible to pronounce first time without stammering). The Wikipedia defines commoditization as “the process by which goods that have economic value and are distinguishable in terms of attributes (uniqueness or brand) end up becoming simple commodities in the eyes of the market or consumers. It is the movement of a market from differentiated to undifferentiated price competition and from monopolistic to perfect competition” or according to my own dictionary of plain English: “I’ll buy the same product from whoever will sell it to me the cheapest”. It would appear that after years of investing in branding (and actively encouraging consumer snobbery), or selling products through values associated to brands at a premium …when the credit-crunch comes, consumers go back to their animal instincts of price first and last. Merchants, companies (and destinations) panic and drop everything but their trousers to give them that Price and the result is ruthless competition and a right old mess.

The risk of commoditization in the Tourism business in Spain is evident in the results of the Lookinside.travel survey where the top two criteria for choosing a hotel are first “Price” and second “value for money” (i.e. Price but related to quality of service…but price at the end of the day). Only if the price is right will the consumer start to look at things like location or basic services, let alone the filling used in pillows or the brand of complimentary toiletries.

The term was most used in the context of Spain’s future as an incoming destination and more particularly the effect of Tunisia’s aggressive strategy to attract visitors at any price. If the only commodity in tourism is a sunny beach then British and German tourists aren’t going to differentiate between a sunny beach in the Costa del Sol or a very similar sunny beach in Tunisia (which, by the way, is currently up to 70% cheaper).

The first part of today’s event was rather boldly presented as “The future of Tourism in Spain” and was, predictably, mainly about domestic tourism. I swear I could actually see the audience’s shoulders drop and backs hunch under the weight of negative statistics and predictions presented by venerable leaders of industry in the terms and with the tone that we have become used to from the evening news. At the end of his presentation (which was, by the way, very pragmatic, informative and refreshingly free from the usual politics) Manuel Butler, Director General of Turespaña insisted that Spain’s differentiation is its ability to bring happiness to visitors and Spain must therefore continue to develop their marketing campaign on the slogan of “I need Spain to be happy”. As I glanced around at the long and worried faces in the room I thought that we too should have a slogan for the outbound market “I need the Spanish to be happy”.

Luckily the gush of fresh air and optimism we needed to displace the foggy gloom of negative figures that was hanging over the audience came in the shape of Amuda Goeli, co-founder and CEO of online travel agency Destinia. Although he modestly described himself as a “freaky programmer”, this Egyptian entrepreneur obviously has more in his head than the roots of an enviable mop of dreadlocks. Amuda was great value to the event, not only because of the experience and truths he brought to the debate but also the humour and sincerity with which he expressed them. He was, for instance, shamelessly damning of the Spanish tour operator business. “They were late going online and when they finally did they screwed it up”. As a result the OTAs such as Destinia are, almost reluctantly, getting into the packaging business. “I have a friend who runs a big tour operator” he said “and he told me his problem was that his clients are literally dying off” it sounds cruel and a little exaggerated but there is no doubt that there is a generational change in the Spanish traveller. Amuda was more precise still and said “we are no longer seeing a generation of change as we have moved to a change in generation”.

As I said above, I will go into the actual results of the Lookinside.travel report later but as far as outbound travel is concerned there are not many changes from last year’s report and no big surprises. Two facts did however catch my attention. First a comment by Antonio Cladera the CEO of Amigo Autos that “we are noticing more and more cases of clients that simply don’t have a credit card to use to guarantee a booking, something which for years we have taken for granted has changed with the credit crunch”. The other interesting conclusion of the survey itself was that despite the fact that more and more Spaniards are using internet to plan and book their holidays they are visiting less and less sites per user. This makes sense as the market becomes more internet savvy, people are going straight to the sites they know work for them. By the way destination websites are growing in their influence.

Ironically this last fact would suggest to me that online travel agencies are managing to get brand loyalty by offering differentiation through quality of content and service and they are therefore avoiding the unfortunate and unpronounceable commoditization.

More to follow shortly.

The stage is set for the presentation of Lookinside.travel 2011

Spanish Destination Barometer (Nov 2011) by Google Travel Spain

Google Travel Spain have released their Destination Barometer for November 2011. Their conclusions (in their words) are:

• Mediterranean and Coastal destinations are reaching year lows.
• Snow destinations have seen the largest M/M increase in queries, with +140% query growth,
• Caribbean and Spanish Islands have seen a decrease in November vs. October.
• The search for major countries like France, United Kingdom, Italy or United States has seen a positive M/M growth this November.
• The Canary Islands was the only beach/coastal destination that kept a positive M/M growth.

Google have put a lot of effort into taking the vast amount of data that can be drawn from their search engine and sharing it in the form of useful information for Destinations. This is relevant, useful and free data and I, for one, am very grateful. Without wanting to “look a gift-horse in the mouth” however I think they need to go a little further in the presentation of the data, fine tuning their methodology and enriching the data with some more in-depth interpretation.

Google is an extremely sophisticated “Big Brother” and they can access data to incredible depth. I would suggest therefore that they work on a few more contextual parameters that will stop non-travel related searches contaminating the raw destination data. Examples from this month’s report that illustrate this are the increases in searches for Thailand (in the media because of major floods and not overflowing with tourists) and Yemen (google searches obviously not by prospective tourists!). There are also different ways to read the same data as shown by the decrease, month on month, for interest in Kenya which is actually great news for the destination because it shows the market having less concerns about the security issues that were in the media the previous month.

Anyway it is very good of Google to share the raw data with us at all and I guess it is up to each of us to use this gift as we can and add our own insights and data from other sources.