What exactly is forward-looking search data?

So, what exactly is forward-looking search data in the context of the hotel industry?

Simply put, forward-looking search data describes top-of-funnel information that helps you better anticipate future market behaviour in your destination. This is essentially search data that is gathered during the earliest phase of the guest sales journey, when potential guests are still in the ‘dreaming’ or research phase.

By combining this top-of-funnel information, forward-looking data reveals booking intent and provides an accurate overview of unconstrained demand for future dates. A few examples of these higher-funnel data sets are hotel and flight search patterns.

Traditionally, local events, seasonality and even the day of the week have driven demand. As we are all too well aware, the hospitality industry has faced unforeseen events over the past two years, and previous assumptions are not always as certain as they may have been in the past.

Instead of using realised on-the-books (OTB) data and past data for forecasting and pricing strategies, hoteliers can now utilise these new future-facing data sets to make better commercial decisions.

Forward-looking search data can help you to forecast the hotel demand level of your market, even with a vast amount of variables. While all these searches don’t always convert into bookings, when aggregated on a large scale they can help you understand traveller intent. 

Forward looking search data can reveal the length of stays that guests may be interested in, as well as the intended travel dates, and the geographical location where the searches originate from to indicate which source markets possess the highest demand.