Why Virgin Holidays Created the Trending Travel Guide
Have you ever returned from your holiday and realised you missed out on something?
Like the real party was just around the corner, the restaurant you needed to go to was already fully booked, or the experience of a lifetime was just out of reach?
The Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) is real. It doesn’t matter if you’re going away for 2 days or 2 weeks – Every. Minute. Counts.
But what if there was a way to crowdsource your travel tips? A way to social proof your getaway - so that you can you can dine in the newest restaurants; party in the coolest bars; and discover those hidden gems - without spending hours trawling through out of date guides and ?
Our holiday habits are changing
Not only are we using review sites and social media to research our holidays (12% more Millennials than Non-Millennials source travel recommendations from social), but with international roaming data plans – you don’t even need to wait three weeks to ‘holiday spam’ your friends and families with postcards - remember those?
The trend is growing with each new generation. According to the Expedia’s Millennial Traveller Report, 42% of Millennials admit that “Holiday photos posted by my contacts on social media influence where I decide to go on holiday” while less than a third (29%) of Generation X said it had an influence – a number which nearly halves for the Babyboomer Generation (16%).
In creating the Trending Travel Guide, we’ve built the world’s first social media curated travel companion. By using the world’s most powerful social media monitoring tool, and analysing some of the most popular tourist destinations, we want to give real-time recommendations that means you’ll never miss out again.
Every day, we repeat our social crawl - pulling in hundreds of thousands of new tweets, comments, reviews, and posts into add to our dataset and refreshing our results accordingly.
If something suddenly ‘goes viral’, that location moves up our leader board. If somewhere closes off season, it moves down. This means that you’ll be able to see in real-time what is trending right now in the destinations you love.
Not only that, we contacted some of the top influencers posting about these locations and asked them to write what made that place so special for them. We also talked to the people involved in the day-to-day running of these stores, restaurants, museums, art galleries, night clubs, bars, parks and attractions, to get their thoughts on the places they love.
Think we’ve missed something?
Did you find a hidden gem on your travels worth shouting about? Maybe your business has blown up online in recent months? Either way, if you think there’s something missing from our guide, let us know. We’re happy to investigate, review and add new instaworthy places.
To add a new place, simple send:
- A few high-resolution images that sum up the vibe of the place
- A list of all the social media handles/hashtags for that location
- A 50-75 word blurb about what makes that place so popular
We'll then set our bots to work and find out the size of its social footprint. Suitable applicants will then be added to the guide.
For more information about how we gathered the data for this guide, head to our data page.