About

Summary 

The GNTO needed research to ascertain the impact of social media in travel and tourism and the growing importance of OTAs and their cooperation with National Tourist Organisations in Great Britain. The research covered three areas: Influencers, benchmarking the use of Influencers and the role of OTA’s in UK tourism. 

Our Approach 

We identified and named the top 30 travel influencer (blogs, Instagram, influencer, syndicates) in the UK & Ireland and identified their: 

1. Current number of fans/ followers
2. Current engagement rates in a week
3. Themes and subjects covered 
4. Average number of posts in a week 
5. If they worked with brands (or in partnership) and if so, which products or brands, and whether or not these were long-term partnerships or one-off projects.

Germany’s main competitors in the UK were France, Spain, Italy, Ireland and the UK itself. The GNTO was seeking information as to:

1. Which Social media channels were used by these competitors?
2. Current number of fans/followers of their top 3 channels
3. Current engagement rates of their top 3 channels in a week
4. Current number of posts of their top 3 channels in a week
5. Subjects and themes covered
6. Whether their competitors were working in partnership with brands and if so which ones.

The GNTO also wanted to find out how the performance of Booking.com, Expedia.com (incl. hotels.com), lastminute.com, Opodo.com and  Kayak.co.uk compared with Tripadvisor.com. They needed to know if these OTAs were the top five in the UK or whether there were other relevant platforms.

Outcome 

At the time of writing the report (2017) the three most popular social media platforms used by GNTB competitors were Facebook, Instagram and Twitter (with all 5 competitors using these 3 platforms).

• The UK and Italy used the most social platforms (6) with Ireland, Spain and France all using 4 each.
• Facebook was the largest social platform in terms of fans for all 5 competitors.
• The UK had the largest following across their top three platforms by approximately twice as much as the nearest rival.
• Amongst Germany’s competitors, the highest number of Followers on the top 3 social platforms were:
  • UK: approx 4 million
  • Spain: approx 2 million
  • France: approx 1.5 million
  • Italy: approx 750K
  • Ireland: Approx 725K

The report highlighted the importance of national tourist offices prioritising their goals before entering into agreements with Influencers. For example, is the goal brand awareness and thus engagement and consumers seeing and interacting with content from Influencers in partnership with the tourist board site? Or is the goal sales, and to drive traffic to OTAs or primary owned websites? Instagram typically gained on average 70% more engagement than Facebook, however although Facebook had less engagement it is more likely to traffic.