Is search in travel becoming more navigation and less discovery?
Heather from HitWise released a very interesting graph, showing a six percent increase in travel brand searches. She suggests that loyalty is growing among travel searches as a result search is increasingly being used as a navigational tool.
Brands have now established themselves in the space, especially comparison brands like Expedia and Lastminute.com – partly helped by search engines also having evolved to favour big brands. The inevitability of both link based and user driven algorithms leading to the rich get richer.
I think there’s something else equally as significant at play – Travel choice is something that is hugely influenced by the conversations in the network (TripAdvisor anyone?) – So, we may be seeing the influence of social media on the research and discovery phase in travel, which would naturally increase the navigational use of search.
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