As the summer travel season gets closer, MMGY Global has been sharing top insights from the 2017–2018 Portrait of American Travelers®, including Google being the top source travelers turn to when booking trips, the uptick in road trips and more. MMGY Global’s latest travelhorizons™ survey, new business wins and acquisition of Hills Balfour also generated media interest, with the agency garnering coverage in top-tier consumer and trade outlets such as The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Ad Age, Yahoo! Finance, Medium, TravelAge West, Fashionista and Kansas City Business Journal.
Highlights include:
When It Comes to Booking Travel, Seeing Is Believing
According to MMGY Global’s 2017–2018 Portrait of American Travelers®, 40 percent of travelers turn to Google first when booking trips, making it the No. 1 influencer across travel. MMGY Global’s CEO, Clayton Reid, was interviewed for an Ad Age article on competition between Expedia and Priceline where he shared consumer rationale for relying on Google searches in combination with or even above OTA-displayed figures, explaining: “Travelers are generally distrustful of what they see online when it comes to travel. There’s this undercurrent of ‘I don’t trust what I see, I need to validate it.'”
Americans Are Choosing the Car Over Coach
A Chicago Tribune article on family spring break travel cited the Portrait of American Travelers® finding that more vacationers are opting to drive rather than fly. The preference for driving was also echoed in a recent road trip piece in The New York Times, which highlighted the Portrait of American Travelers® insight that 39 percent of U.S. leisure travel in 2017 included a road trip, up 17 points from 2015.
NJF in the News
Bulldog Reporter awarded NJF silver in the 2018 Bulldog PR Awards for its Best Issue/Cause Advocacy Campaign submission titled “Intrepid Travel | Defining Responsible Tourism Leadership.” This is the agency’s first Bulldog PR Award win!
Additionally, NJF Senior Vice President Lauren Kaufman was the featured guest on an episode of The PRWeek Podcast,where she and the hosts discussed communications and marketing in the travel and destination business, MMGY Global’s growth, Facebook’s data issues and more.