Sarah Paulhus
Sarah Paulhus

INTRO

Google Destination Insights

DESIGN DIRECTOR - R/GA

In the spring of 2020, travel had taken its biggest hit in recent years in response to the Covid-19 global pandemic with borders being closed and flights and accommodations being cancelled all around the world. In order to help navigate this time period, Google set to create a tool to support government bodies and tourism organizations, giving them access to data about how consumers were traveling and where they were going, in order to make informed decisions around travel regulations and border restrictions.

Destination Insights was one part of a larger project which also included accommodation insights, and we were responsible for gathering, organizing and presenting this data in the cleanest way possible. Data was pulled directly from Google search inquiries, things like “Hotels in Bali” or “Flights to Singapore” and a users location when searching is used as the source location.

 
 

A set of filters at the very top of the page help narrow down the search and all sections below will be affected by these filters. The page defaults to “Worldwide” search data upon landing, but users can change the the destination or origin countries by altering the filters. Other customizations include domestics vs international travel, and date ranges for the data shown.

 
 

Travel Demand overview showed us what was happening in 2020 vs 2019 so that consumers could determine existing level of demand relative to before the pandemic and how it is trending over time for a selected country. Users could hover over the different points on the graph to see exact indexed data for data sets of a few days or a few months.

 
 

In addition to overall demand, we also created a way to show consumers where users were looking to travel to by top destinations; continent-wide, country-wide, and by city. In addition to top destinations, we created another set of graphs centered around percentage growth determined by comparing the data to same time last year. Our goal was to connect government bodies to this data to understand travel traffic flows to prioritize safe border reopenings.