Brits love to search for holidays during a public holiday but this weekend is about to break that trend. Find out how COVID-19 is affecting travel seasonality...

Travel is a mature online market in the UK. An online veteran that’s settled into a consistent seasonal routine like a grandfather clock chiming away the hours. The Google Trend graph below illustrates the “Holiday” search term, you can see that there is a regular pattern (data from 1st Jan 2016 to current day).

The predictable nature of this online behaviour is important as it provides marketers with the ability to forecast what is going to happen so they can plan their digital strategies. As you can see below there is a regular pattern that Brits like to follow, searching for holidays during public holidays:

• Blue - January Blues
• Yellow - Easter bank holidays
• Green - Early May bank holiday
• Orange - Spring bank holiday
• Purple - End of the school term
• Red - Summer bank holiday
• Black - Thomas Cook goes into administration

The only real anomaly across this period was an increase in holiday search during the end of September 2019, which coincided with the collapse of Thomas Cook and potentially people rebooking their holidays.

Understanding when consumers are looking to purchase key products and the messages that are going to resonate with them is one of the smartest ways of gaining traction in this market and ultimately improving sales, however, right now that trend is broken. COVID-19 has plunged the travel sector into uncharted waters. The chart below illustrates the disparity between the average search term volume for the Easter bank holiday and the current volume.

Update (15/04/20):

Following the Easter bank holiday, with isolation, social distancing and the glorious weather there was evidence of a slight uptick in holiday searches on Google. I’ll continue to monitor this and other travel trends over the coming weeks and months.