We’re 75% of the way through the year in travel and it’s time for our latest look back at how the summer season fared in our Q3 search analysis. Often seen as a busy period for ‘lates’, with last minute bargains and travellers finally pressing the book button after months of deliberation, let’s see how search volumes have changed year on year.

Here we go!

Q3 2024 headlines

  • Search volumes in travel continue to increase with an impressive growth of 21% for the quarter. This is on top of an 18% increase which was seen the year before and demonstrates the general increase overall of searches being carried out on Google.
  • Once again, the biggest growth by country was the travel darling of 2024, Albania, with a growth of 117% for this year v 2023 (which had also grown 112%). Whilst we have to take some of the data in our research with a pinch of salt as it’s never 100% accurate, it is at least indicative of a trend that we’ve seen in 2024, where Albania has risen faster % wise than any other country. OK, so making big % gains is hardly revolutionary, but the growth of Albania over the last two years is really quite remarkable, as illustrated in the chart below. The size of the bubble relates to the search volume, so whilst Montenegro has grown well this Q3 compared to last year, it’s not the same size as Albania.
  • The top 5 winners this quarter were:

    o Bosnia and Herzegovina up 126% (12k)
    o Albania up 117% (238k)
    o Chile up 96% (14k)
    o Algeria up 88% (10k)
    o Montenegro up 83% (100k)
Growth Q3 2022 2024 image

Note: Only countries with a search volume of over 50,000 per quarter are shown here.

  • Sadly, there are still many conflicts going on across the world. When it comes to the biggest losers in this quarter, it’s not surprising that the wars affecting so many millions of people have an impact on travel to those destinations. There are still some places that have fallen out of favour to some degree in addition to those fighting battles, such as Iceland and UAE.

    o Israel down 37% (17K)
    o Senegal down 30% (5k)
    o Jordan down 28% (16k)
    o Iceland down 28% (72k)
    o UAE down 28% (43k)

Deep analysis of the lates market

With some travel businesses and travel agents reporting a drop in demand in Q2 after a decent start to the year, there was a lot of hope being placed on a strong late market to bring booking numbers up for the third quarter. Did that happen?

If we look at the types of holidays that were searched for more this year versus previous years, we can see a shift towards UK, luxury holidays and 18-30 style holidays outside of the continued growth in cruise and ski, both of which have done well all year.

It would seem that there was a big push towards certain types of UK based holidays (e.g. ‘campsites cornwall’ up 250%(!) and ‘caravan breaks in the uk’ up 65% where more and more searches were carried out, perhaps indicating a switch in certain travellers to different types of holidays this summer. If we compared these UK-based searches to holiday searches in traditionally popular countries and places around Europe, then the link continues. ‘Holidays in france’, ‘menorca holidays’ and ‘greece holidays’ all saw search growth of less than than 5%. When the average of the quarter for this year versus last year is 21%, a small single digit increase indicates a weak signal in the last-minute market compared to other much ‘bigger’ destinations. Similarly, package holiday related phrases also fell too.

Changes in SV 2024 image

Carrying on the trend of an apparent flat-lining of overseas travel for families this summer, a deep dive on villa related phrases shows a drop in overall search volume for the second year in a row. Overall, search volume for villa related phrases dropped 2% this year v last year, and that was from a drop of 10% the year before. It would appear that the boom in villas post pandemic was a blip and the general trend is not one of stagnation but gradual decline.

Villa drop q3 2024 image

With that said, not all destinations are equal and it would appear that there has been a large increase in luxury villas in Italy as the only standout in this market this year.

Villa phrases q3 2024 image

What about cruise?

Each quarter I’ve taken time to look at the different sectors within travel as best I can, but the one sector that always needs to be discussed is cruise. No sector has grown as much and at such scale as cruise in the last few years. I’ve spoken on behalf of CLIA several times in the last year or so and have only had positive news to share!

Overall, the general news for Q3 is still positive! If we look at searches carried out for brands and generic phrases in cruise, both are significantly up on 2023 which was also a good year! Generic searches for Q3 were up 40% this year (and 24% last year) and for brand searches, they are up 25% in 2024 (and again 22% last year). When it comes to the split between ocean and river cruise, there is only a small difference, with ocean winning out by 5% points (22% v 17%).

All things are in very good health it would seem and certainly there isn’t anything negative to report on, although perhaps the one wave on the river is that searches ahead of the curve this year have slowed down. Overall searches for the phrase ‘cruise holidays <year>’ is down slightly compared to 2023 in general at -3%. For ‘river cruise holidays <year>’ though, it’s the opposite and is +14% which shows perhaps more growth in that area or perhaps a small switch away from ocean to river experiences.

Cruise holidays q3 2024 image

Overall searches ahead of time down -3% compared to 2023

River cruise holidays q3 2024 image

Overall searches ahead of time up 14% compared to 2023

Final points

Our Q3 research confirms key market trends: cruise continues to grow, Albania is still the shining star and other markets continue to slow down.. For some regions, sectors and countries, things continue to be pretty tough, whilst others have had huge impacts on their revenue due to continued (and seemingly never-ending) wars and conflict which have hugely impacted travel in certain parts of the world.

As we head into Q4, there are still many unknowns that might affect our bookings into 2025, including the US election, the UK budget (still, sigh),inflation and interest rates which all continue to bubble away in the background. With Q4 an important research period for a lot of potential travellers, it’ll be interesting to see how any changes in the market occur and how searchers behave going into the all-important peaks period for 2025.

We’ll keep publishing our research as we get it and hope you come back for more in a few months’ time! If you want to have our travel data delivered to you as it goes live, why not sign up to our newsletter below!

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Meet the author ...

Andy Headington

CEO

Andy has been part of Adido since it was an idea in a pub nearly twenty years ago. He loves to work with the Adido team and all of the clients on board asking challenging questions and ...