With travel - at home and abroad - set to return on Monday 17th May, our Commercial Trading Director, Jacque Chadwick, takes a look at our latest travel insights
Travel’s welcome post-lockdown return on 17th May received a huge boost last week with the UK Government’s highly anticipated reveal of its green list of countries for international travel.
As expected, interest in the 7th May announcement among our travel hungry audience was intense, which led to high engagement with travel content. Across the Ozone platform we saw:
+44% travel page views growth on Friday 7th May vs. the prior day, with page views at almost 1m a day across the weekend
16.6m travel page views consumed in the 7 days to Sunday 9th May, a stellar increase of +53% week on week
+35% week on week growth of unique travel readers to 4.2m - our highest weekly travel audience of this year
This type of audience engagement with our publishers’ travel content is something we have seen time and again over the course of the pandemic, as travel restrictions have been imposed and then eased by the government.
Earlier this year, we saw increased engagement in travel content in the week after Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced the UK’s lockdown easing roadmap on Monday 22nd February.
Across the Ozone portfolio weekly page views of travel content increased by +26% versus the week before the roadmap was announced, with dwell times up +31%. Our travel content has remained a source of positive inspiration with 75% of editorial containing no mention of the pandemic.
We saw further evidence of this last summer when both long haul and short haul content spiked on 13th Monday 13th July, which marked the day the Government allowed all remaining shops and services to reopen. A week later on the 27th of July when all non-essential travel to Spain was advised against, we saw an enormous spike in interest in content based on other short haul or UK destinations.
76% of our c.10m strong monthly travel audience engage with our travel content via mobile for inspiration, but potentially switch to computer to complete travel bookings
Knowing about and planning for these types of engagement spikes is great, but what we see in our audience insights about when to connect with travel readers in the week is so important. While travel conversions and purchase are more likely to happen at weekends, reading patterns show weekdays to be critical research periods. In particular, spikes in engagement were most pronounced on dream-filled Monday evenings and just before the working day ends on Fridays.
Travel is a huge topic of interest among millions of consumers nationwide. According to PAMCo, our broadcast scale and depth of holidays content reaches 90% of Great Britain’s avid travel readers. Added to this we deliver a persistent view of travel audiences through high visitor frequency. 64% of our monthly travel audience returns to us daily; 91% return weekly, also according to PAMCo.
While lockdowns during the pandemic have restricted our freedom of movement, our publishers’ content has continued, and will continue to provide our readers with inspiration and trusted advice for their travel plans - so with restrictions finally lifting, now is the time to connect with them.
