Google: These countries are loved by Hungarians the most

The travelling habits have changed in Hungary since last year, while domestic tourism is flourishing

According to Origo.hu, the first couple of months gave interesting results about which countries do Hungarians Google when planning a vacation: Italy leads the list, Spain has the second place and Austria has the third. From the aspect of cities, London is the most popular, followed by Barcelona, Rome and Dubai, as it was told by Google Hungary’s financial executive Henrietta Boncsér at a press release on Wednesday.

Last summer, the top countries were slightly different: Italy was also represented on that list, but only in the second place, as the first rank was taken by Croatia. The top three cities from the Google search perspective were Vienna, London and Prague.

Boncsér also highlighted a new tendency that 36.1 percent of the searches were done from a mobile apparatus this year so far – compared to last year’s rate of 33 percent – so the role of these devices seems to increase. She mentioned that Monday, Tuesday and Sunday were the days of the week that witnessed most of the searches last year.

The most searched categories related to organizing a vacation were the following in 2016: questions about the destination (49%), hotels (24%) and flights (9%). Apartman renting, holiday packages, local attractions, trains, buses, taxi cabs and car services, last minute travels and car renting were also popular.

Szallas.hu’s product manager István Pap told about the current trends in domestic tourism. As he claimed, the value of bookings between this year’s January and May increased above 24 million euros. Due to the cancellations, the annual growth can be 35 percent. With almost 58.5 million euros of total income from accommodation bookings, this year might be a record year. And not only the Hungarian market is dwindling but so does the Croatian: the increase was 64 percent this year.

Most Hungarians usually book apartments or guest houses, as these forms of accommodation give 60 percent of the total bookings. They like to pay in cash the most (49%), followed by credit card (13%) and Szép card (23%) on the top list of paying methods.

The most popular holiday destinations within the borders of Hungary were Siófok, Hajdúszoboszló and Budapest. It is worth to mention that Keszthely – which is a town in Zala county on the northwestern shores of Lake Balaton – produced the greatest increase this year, as it ranked up six positions this year in popularity.

Danubius Hotels business development manager Zoltán Bogár told some good news about the hotels of Budapest: in the first four months of this year, the Hungarian capital had the 15^th place among the 35 European cities, producing the 8^th highest improvement on the list and beating Rome, Athens, Brussels, Bratislava and Vienna, according to the recent data of STR Global. He also shared his opinion that Budapest’s reputation as a safe holiday destination might have contributed to its increase in popularity. He claimed that the Airbnb phenomenon takes away 10 percent of the hotels’ traffic. On the other hand, he named the high VATs related to accommodation services (18 percent) as a backlashing factor in Budapest’s popularity.

Source: Origo.hu