Google continues to release interesting snippets around search behaviour in travel as part of its travel micro-moments marketing push.
Just two months ago, it unveiled a Playbook as a guide to the phases of travel research and booking.
As part of the I-want-to-get-away moments phase - when travellers are dreaming and exploring options for their trip - the search giant introduces Liam (30 years old) to demonstrate, through click data, how a typical consumer is behaving in this phase.
The example uses information from Luth Research to first of all show all the digital touchpoints via desktop (searches, website visits, video clicks) over a four-month period.
The 534 Google searches are scary on the one hand in terms of the amount of shopping around but can also be seen, in a positive light, as representing numerous opportunities for travel companies.
The breakdown of the digital touchpoints is also interesting for the dominance of visits to online travel agencies.
Next, it drills down to just one of Liam's search paths which again shows the dominance of OTAs claiming 39 visits over a five-hour period.
Google says consumers are not committed to any brand during this 'dreaming' phase so it's up to travel companies to provide the right content.
The search giant goes into more detail as part of its guide to travel micro-moments including some research from Destinations on Google showing 60% of searches for destinations start on a mobile device.
In addition, Google says the main image of a destination is one of the elements attracting most engagement with consumers who tap the image going on to look at about 10 images.
Lots of other good stuff in there too around the use of video in destination selection.
Related reading:
Making online travel content for users in micro-moments
Those Google stages of travel applied to mobile