2022 Travel Forecast: In-Depth Analysis of America’s Google Searches
When will Americans feel safe to travel again? That question has been the subject of debate for almost two years during the COVID-19 pandemic. As we head into the 2022 travel season, it’s top of mind once again for millions of people around the globe. One thing is for sure this year, despite the massive hits the travel industry has suffered from the Omicron surge, travelers are more eager than ever to plan those long overdue vacations.
How safe it is to travel depends on many factors and is ultimately a personal choice. To understand American attitudes towards travel this year, we collected Google search and traveler throughput data, ran forecasting models and compiled our outlooks for the 2022 travel season.
The predictions are plotted below to help enthusiastic travelers navigate these uncharted waters. Our analysis focuses on Google search activity surrounding three core travel categories: hotels, flights and cruises. Our models rank states based on predicted travel interest in 2022, including changes in rankings from 2021. We also analyzed U.S. states by the composition of predicted travel search in each category to forecast what people in each state are most interested in this year.
Summary of Our Key Findings:
1. In 2022, searches for cruises are projected to rise 102.8%, flights by 35.2%, and hotels are expected to drop 2% relative to all Google searches.
2. People in Florida are anticipated to be most actively searching for travel in 2022, unchanged since 2019.
3. The states with the largest projected increases in travel search for 2022 are Virginia, California, Michigan, Hawaii and Connecticut.
4. The states with the largest projected decreases in travel search for 2022 are Indiana, Kentucky, Colorado, Mississippi and Rhode Island.
5. In 2022, searches for hotels will certainly exceed that of vacation rentals, but Airbnb and Vrbo can expect a 2.3% gain of total lodging hospitality searches.
6. The states with the largest projected increases in flight search for 2022 are Michigan, New Jersey, South Carolina, Tennessee and Mississippi.
7. U.S. passenger airline traffic is expected to grow 11.3% in 2022 over 2021.
We performed additional research within each core industry to verify if our travel forecasts align with early 2022 data. From what we uncovered, our models are right on track.
Our Key Research Findings:
1. Advanced cruise ticket sales for the second half of 2022 and the first half of 2023 are at historic highs.
2. Vacation rentals are seeing record increases in bookings, surpassing pre-pandemic demand.
3. U.S. airports are seeing 93% more daily travelers on average so far in 2022 than in 2021.
Many cruise lines are canceling voyages and temporarily pausing new bookings to limit the spread of the Omicron variant. Despite these significant setbacks for the cruise line industry, Carnival Corporation released promising advanced bookings information in a recent fourth-quarter 2021 business update.
“Cumulative advanced bookings for the second half of 2022 and first half of 2023 are at the higher end of historical ranges and at higher prices, with or without future cruise credits (“FCC”), normalized for bundled packages, as compared to 2019 sailings,” Carnival said in the update. The company also said they expect “the full fleet to be back in operation in the spring of 2022.”
Although hotel occupancy rates hit record highs over the holidays, early January data reveals levels are falling back well below 2019 rates, according to booking information shared by the hospitality analytics firm STR. Far from recovering to pre-pandemic levels, our models forecast that overall hotel search interest will fall 2% nationally in 2022, with drops near 20% in New Jersey, Michigan, Illinois, Rhode Island and Florida.
A lot of that lost hotel demand will convert to vacation rental demand. According to data shared by short-term rental analytics firm, AirDNA, vacation rental demand has fully recovered from pre-pandemic levels, and they project demand to grow 14.1% in 2022. AirDNA’s estimate aligns with the projected 2.3% increase in the share of lodging hospitality searches our models forecasted for vacation rentals.
Airlines are still struggling with post-holiday staffing shortages due to the Omicron variant. Still, TSA checkpoint travel numbers show impressive daily traveler growth in the first two weeks of 2022 compared to last year. Our forecasting models predict this growth to continue into April and then pull back for the rest of the year, achieving modest gains over 2021.
Our travel forecasts vary significantly by region and category, and the visualizations below illustrate the predicted differences. The table ranks states by combined estimated search activity, and the bar chart provides a categorical breakdown for each state. Compare our 2022 forecast with 2021 actual data in both visualizations.
Methodology
Trips to Discover analyzed travel search interest by category and state using direct data exports from Google Trends for whole years 2018-2021. To formulate our 2022 forecasts, we calculated a weighted average across each year and placed the results into a normal distribution. Each distribution was put into a repeated random sampling probability model called a Monte Carlo simulation with over 1.2 million samples to obtain a range of possible outcomes and the probabilities that they will occur. TSA checkpoint travel numbers (2019-2021) were used to generate our airline passenger traffic forecast. This article’s visualizations and analysis were created using the most-likely possibilities based on our forecasting models.
You can download our analysis in its entirety (from Google Drive) here.
Tableau, Flourish Studio, MS Excel and Google Trends were the tools used to analyze and create data visualizations for this article.
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