What countries are most likely to want to use social travel websites?

NB: This is a guest article by David Los, co-founder of Tripl.

The internet has allowed the world to become a much more global environment where geographic boundaries are eliminated and human interaction goes way beyond national borders.

The rise of social networking combined with continuous growth of international travel has produced an opportunity to communicate with travelers, locals, and people within your network that transcends cultural differences and increases the overall travel experience.

Tripl (see TLabs and follow-up) is trying to build the world’s most comprehensive social travel platform, and was interested in measuring which countries would be impacted the most by a "social travel" product.

An index was produced that took into consideration national internet usage, social networking usage, and travel related activity.

The results of the report for the top 20 countries were as follows:

Hong Kong - 0.87
Norway - 0.76
Singapore - 0.70
Denmark - 0.65
Sweden - 0.63
Austria - 0.63
Ireland - 0.62
Canada - 0.61
United Kingdom - 0.60
Netherlands - 0.58
Belgium - 0.57
Switzerland - 0.57
New Zealand - 0.56
United States - 0.53
Australia - 0.51
Finland - 0.50
Croatia - 0.47
Uruguay - 0.45
Malaysia - 0.45
Portugal - 0.44

Hong Kong is no surprise as the overall leader. It has the most Facebook penetration as a percentage of its population and has annual international tourist arrivals three times its population.

A strong trend that emerged from the study was Scandinavia's prevalence as a social travel leader. Its strong adoption to new technologies combined with expenditure on international traveler (per capita) provided three spots in the top ten.

Infographic:

Methodology

To produce the index, three separate categories were considered: overall internet usage, social networking usage, and travel related data.

The weights for each of these categories were as follows:

Internet usage - 20%
Social networking - 40%
Travel related data - 40%

Both the social networking and the travel related data was then reduced to 2 subcategories each. The data used for each of these sections can be found below.

Social statistics: 40%

When first establishing which countries we would analyze, we investigated which countries had the most Facebook users and selected the top 65 countries. The source of this data was from from SocialBakers, which provides in-depth Facebook monitoring.

Since China is currently not using Facebook we eliminated it immediately. Hong Kong has the most penetration as a percent of the population with 54% on Facebook.

We then wanted to add an additional level of social networking statistics. Both Twitter and Linkedin were the obvious choices, however finding data sources for each of these sites for all the countries was difficult.

Linkedin provides an ad platform that provides estimated reach for numerous countries, however many were missing.

We decided to use Quantcast’s analysis which provided a geographic breakdown based on cookie tracking.

Although we knew this data was not a perfect reflection of actual penetration, it did provide complete statistics for all the countries. The Netherlands lead this category.

We were not able to find a good source of Twitter data based on geographical usage and therefore eliminated it from the study.

We then took the user statistics and made them based as a percentage of the countries total population. We then indexed those percentages with maximum percentage being indicated by one with other countries being a decimal based on the maximum.

We then weighted the social networking category (40%) of the overall index in terms of overall usage (we realize there might be some overlapping):

Facebook - 750 million users / 850 million total - (35%)
Linkedin - 100 million users / 850 million total - (5%)

Travel statistics: 40%

When producing the travel category we wanted to look at two separate perspectives. How many people travel to that country? And how much do the residents of that country travel travel?

For both of these categories we used National Master as our source, which uses historical CIA Fact Book data.

To measure the first question we looked at statistics for International Tourist Arrivals By Country. Just like the social networking statistics, we looked at the numbers as a percentage of the population and then indexed those numbers based on the maximum value of the category.

Hong Kong had the most international travelers which was 329% more than their national population.

To measure the question of how much do the residents of the country travel, we looked at the Travel Expenditures Per Capita in USD stats. Since this statistic was already proportional based on population, we indexed it based on the maximum.

Norwegians spent the most annual on travel with an average of $1913 per person.

We then weighted the travel category (40%) of the overall index equally:

International Tourist Arrivals (20%)
Expenditures Spent on International Travel (20%)

Internet usage: 20%

As an overall measure of how a country might use the Internet for both social networking, travel research, and other social media reasons, we used an overall Internet usage statistic labeled Users by Country”

When then based this as a proportion of total population and indexed it on the maximum. It seems the Netherlands has the most Internet usage, with 90% of the population online.

NB: This is a guest article by David Los, co-founder of Tripl.

NB2: Four countries were eliminated in the study based on missing data. These included: