What is Travel and Tourism Market Research?
Travel and tourism market research is the process of collecting and analyzing data on how travelers discover, choose, book, and experience travel, so airlines, airports, hotels, destinations, attractions, and other travel brands can make better marketing, product, and operational decisions.
The strongest programs combine quantitative methods (intercept surveys, visitor and guest satisfaction surveys, and online surveys) with qualitative methods (focus groups and in-depth interviews), segment travelers by trip purpose and value, and study the full journey from pre-trip planning to the in-trip experience to post-trip advocacy.
People are traveling more than ever, and that is a huge opportunity for travel brands. But opportunity cuts both ways. The same travelers have endless options, read reviews before they commit, and switch loyalties quickly. To win their business, you have to understand them, and that is what this guide is about.
Below, we walk through what travel and tourism research is, who uses it, how to segment travelers, how to research the full trip from planning to post-visit, the core methods we use with clients, and the challenges unique to this industry.
At Drive Research, we are a national travel market research company that partners with airlines, airports, hotels, museums, and stadiums across the country, and the examples here come straight from that work.
Travel market research is the gathering and analysis of data on traveler behaviors, preferences, and trends. It looks at the factors behind travel decisions, things like destination choice, accommodation preferences, spending habits, and what motivates someone to book, so travel businesses can serve those travelers better.
A travel and tourism market research company is the firm that designs and runs those studies for you. A good one does more than send a survey. It helps define your objectives, identifies exactly who you need to hear from, recommends the right mix of methods, manages fieldwork (including on-site data collection in airports, venues, and attractions), and turns the results into personas, recommendations, and a clear plan of action.
At Drive Research, we specialize in both qualitative and quantitative travel research. In our experience, the brands that get the most value treat research as an ongoing partnership rather than a one-time project, because traveler expectations keep moving.
The Key Takeaway: Tourism market research explains how travelers decide and behave. A travel research company turns that understanding into objectives, the right methods, and recommendations you can act on.
With 40% of U.S. travelers wanting to feel they made the most of their trip, travel brands need to understand what creates a high-quality experience.
And market research is an important tool for businesses in the travel and tourism industry to meet the changing needs of their guests and stay competitive.
There are several benefits of conducting travel and tourism market research including:
The common thread is confidence. Research replaces guessing with evidence, which is exactly what you want before spending real money on operations or marketing.
Travel market research is used by organizations across the industry, but the specific goals can look very different depending on the audience, location, and type of experience being studied.
Here are a few examples:
The common thread is that each organization is trying to make better decisions using real traveler feedback rather than assumptions.
Travel and tourism research is especially useful for:
Pro tip: The audience matters just as much as the organization. A study may need to compare leisure and business travelers, domestic and international visitors, first-time and repeat guests, families and solo travelers, or budget-conscious and luxury travelers. Defining those groups early helps make the research more actionable once the results come in.
Travel and tourism research starts with the same core building blocks as any market research study, but there are a few travel-specific considerations that can make or break the quality of the insights.
Before choosing a method, define the decision the research needs to support. Are you trying to improve the guest experience, test a destination campaign, understand leakage, build traveler personas, or measure satisfaction over time? The more specific the objective, the easier it is to design a study that leads to clear recommendations.
In travel research, “travelers” is usually too broad.
A business traveler moving quickly through an airport has different needs than a family visiting a museum on vacation.
A repeat guest at a resort may evaluate the experience differently than a first-time visitor.
Before writing the survey, decide which traveler groups matter most and whether you need enough completes to analyze them separately.
The best method depends on where the traveler is in their journey.
We’ll dive into this later in the post too.
Travel research is highly sensitive to timing and location. For intercept surveys, fieldwork should account for peak and off-peak periods, weekdays and weekends, different flight banks, event times, or visitor traffic patterns. Otherwise, the sample may overrepresent one type of traveler and miss another.
If you want to compare business versus leisure travelers, domestic versus international visitors, or first-time versus repeat guests, that needs to be planned before fieldwork starts.
Waiting until the survey is complete often leaves you with too few responses in key subgroups to make confident decisions.
Timing matters, too. As Alyce, one of our research managers, recently shared on LinkedIn, good travel market research is not just about asking the right question. It is about asking at the right moment.
A traveler rushing to leave a hotel or still caught up in the emotion of a trip may answer differently than they would once they are home and reflecting on the full experience.
The value of travel research is not just in the data. It is in turning that data into personas, journey-stage insights, experience improvements, marketing recommendations, and next steps teams can actually use.
A good travel market research study does more than ask travelers what they think. It captures the right feedback from the right people at the right moment in their journey.
Travel research methods fall into two families.
Most strong programs use both. Here are the methods we rely on most.
There is no better place to gather insight than at the most pivotal points of a visit.
Intercept surveys are a quantitative method conducted wherever there is a steady flow of visitors: airports, museums, hotels, stadiums, and more. A trained surveyor approaches travelers with a short questionnaire on a tablet, often working offline.
Case Study: An Airport Builds Customer Personas with Intercept Surveys
An airport hired us to understand its passengers: who they are, how long they spend in the terminal, their spending power, and the key touchpoints across business, leisure, and combined audiences.
We recommended a three-part hybrid approach that paired on-site intercept surveys with a follow-up online survey and advanced mobility analytics.
Two trained interceptors spent 64 hours in the terminal across a range of days and times. The four-minute, twelve-question survey collected 454 responses, and the mobility analytics added anonymized data on where travelers came from.
The result was a set of passenger personas the airport could use to tailor concessions, messaging, and the overall experience.
You can read the full airport customer personas case study for the objectives, approach, and outcomes.
Beyond a single visit, visitor and guest satisfaction surveys help you understand who your travelers are, why they chose you, where they came from, and how satisfied they were. They are a quantitative workhorse great for building personas, tracking satisfaction over time, and evaluating whether your marketing is working.
Keep them tight. Travelers do not love long surveys, so aim for roughly ten minutes and resist the urge to ask everything at once.
If you are about to spend real money promoting a destination or route, test the creative first. Ad concept testing puts your campaign in front of your target travelers before launch, so you can fix what is not landing. It commonly uses focus groups for depth and online surveys to compare concepts side by side at scale.
The payoff is a better return on your media spend and a clearer message.
One honest caution: it is hard to stay objective about the creative your team has poured weeks into, which is a big reason advertising testing with an outside partner is worth it.
Traveler segmentation helps you avoid one of the biggest mistakes in travel research: treating all travelers as the same audience.
A business flyer racing to a connection and a family taking a once-a-year vacation may interact with the same airport, hotel, or destination, but their needs, expectations, and frustrations are completely different.
The same is true for first-time versus repeat visitors, domestic versus international travelers, budget-conscious guests versus luxury travelers, and solo travelers versus groups.
Segmentation research identifies the groups that matter most and explains how their behaviors differ. It can be used to build traveler personas, tailor marketing messages, improve the guest experience, or prioritize investments based on the audiences with the most value.
A best practice is to decide which segments you want to analyze before fieldwork begins. If you want reliable findings for international visitors, business travelers, or high-value guests, you need enough responses from each group to support that analysis.
Another great tourism market research option is visitor surveys. Not only are they a great way to better understand the people visiting your location, but to also evaluate the success of any past or current marketing campaigns.
As a quantitative form of market research, visitor surveys can provide a boatload of insight.
This market research option lets you:
This insight is great for creating traveler personas to help your team visualize the kind of person who visits your destination.
Numbers tell you what is happening. Qualitative research tells you why.
In travel, qualitative work is especially powerful for experience design, messaging, and concept development. We often pair it with a survey: qualitative research generates ideas, and quantitative research tests them at scale.
It’s universally understood that what goes online, typically stays there forever. And for travel and tourism destinations, online reviews are extremely impactful.
In fact, 95% of travelers read seven reviews before making a booking.
But what if you had the magical ability to shift consumers’ attention to something that casts your destination in a more positive light?
Well, it’s not actually magic, but rather what we like to call Online Reputation Management (ORM) and it’s a great travel and tourism market research option.
Essentially, ORM involves adding new, positive content to the internet that then pushes the older, negative material to the end of the line (i.e. lower in the search results).
While our online reputation management company achieves this through customer surveys, there are other strategies that can be implemented to increase your Google reviews.
Travel research comes with industry-specific hurdles that a generic approach tends to miss. Planning for them upfront is part of doing it well.
Seasonality is one of the biggest challenges. Travel demand can swing dramatically by season, school calendars, holidays, weather, events, and peak versus off-peak periods.
A survey conducted during a busy summer weekend may tell a very different story than one conducted in February. If you are tracking satisfaction, demand, or perception over time, keep timing consistent or intentionally study multiple seasons.
Some audiences are easier to capture than others.
Leisure travelers may have more time to complete an intercept survey, while business travelers may be harder to stop.
International visitors, first-time guests, or high-value segments may require more thoughtful sampling plans to make sure their feedback is not lost in the overall average.
Travel is also more vulnerable to disruption than many industries. Weather, health and safety concerns, economic uncertainty, airline issues, geopolitical events, and pricing changes can all affect demand.
Research needs to account for those external factors so the findings are interpreted in the right context.
Traveler expectations are also shifting. Sustainability, flexibility, safety, value, personalization, and convenience can all influence how people choose where to go, where to stay, and what to recommend afterward.
Sustainability and eco-tourism are part of that broader shift.
For some travelers, eco-friendly practices may influence destination or booking choices. For others, sustainability may matter in theory but not enough to pay more or change behavior.
Research can help separate what travelers say they value from what actually drives decisions.
This is especially important for destinations and operators that want to communicate sustainability credibly.
Pro tip: The goal is not to force a green message into the marketing. It is to understand whether sustainability matters to the target traveler, how much it matters, and what proof points make the message feel believable rather than like greenwashing.
What is travel and tourism market research?
It is the process of collecting and analyzing data on how travelers discover, choose, book, and experience travel. Travel brands use it to understand their audience, evaluate marketing, improve the visitor experience, and make confident decisions about operations, pricing, and strategy.
What methods are used in travel and tourism research?
The core quantitative methods are on-site intercept surveys, visitor and guest satisfaction surveys, and online surveys. The core qualitative methods are focus groups and in-depth interviews. Many programs also use ad concept testing, segmentation, and online reputation management. The right mix depends on your objectives and where in the journey you are researching.
Who uses travel and tourism market research?
Airlines, airports, hotels and resorts, cruise lines, theme parks and attractions, museums, stadiums, destinations and tourism boards, travel agencies, and online travel platforms all use it. Each is trying to understand a specific traveler, from business flyers to international leisure visitors.
How do you research travelers at an airport or attraction?
On-site intercept surveys are the go-to method. Trained interviewers approach visitors with a short tablet-based survey while they wait or move through the space, capturing fresh, in-the-moment feedback. These are often paired with a follow-up online survey and analytics to build a fuller picture, as we did in the airport personas study above.
How much does travel market research cost?
It depends on the methods, sample size, and the number of segments or locations you need to cover. On-site intercept fieldwork and qualitative recruiting add cost compared with a straightforward online survey, while a tracking program is priced per wave. The best way to get an accurate number is to share your goals and request a custom quote.
Drive Research is a national market research company specializing in the travel and tourism industry, with expertise across both qualitative and quantitative methods. We partner with airlines, airports, hotels, museums, and stadiums across the country to deliver data-driven insights and clear recommendations.
Whether you want to capture passengers in a terminal, test a destination campaign, build traveler personas, or track guest satisfaction over time, we will design a study around your goals, your audience, and your timeline.
Contact Drive Research today to request a custom quote or talk through your travel research goals with our team.
