6 Charts Showing Latin American Travelers’ Search and Booking Behaviors

Economic recovery isn’t palpable across all of Latin America, but travelers are on the brink of becoming mature markets where it is a reality in the region.

Bogota, Colombia, for example, was the top-booked Latin American city for Q3 2015 when a year ago it wasn’t registering nearly as much popularity. The fact that Colombia has some of the highest economic growth in the region, combined with lower than average hotel rates due to new supply and increased perceptions of safety means cities like Bogota are poised for tourism booms in the years ahead. This is one of the findings from a new report based on more than a billion intent travel data points on Q3 global travel data insights from Sojern, a travel data intelligence company.

Latin American travelers exhibit more stability with their advance and last-minute bookings quarter-over-quarter than other regions and solo travel is huge across the continent–between 50-70% of searches and bookings are for one traveler. They’re also looking to take longer trips, between six and 12-plus days and aren’t apprehensive about booking far in advance, in many cases more than two months before departure. The six charts below illustrate the state of searches and bookings for Latin American travelers as well as what their holiday travel plans are as one of the world’s busiest travel seasons approaches.

Chart 1: More Latin American travelers are searching for travel in advance, many two or more months from departure, than those searching for travel seven days or less from departure. Along with Asia-Pacific, Latin America’s search lead times didn’t fluctuate as much as other regions quarter-over-quarter this year (Q1 and Q2 charts not shown).

Chart 2: These search lead times and trip duration searches that Latin American travelers conducted during Q3 are for travel during various times of the year, with 43% of searches for 12 or more days of travel.

Chart 3: Solo travel appears to be incredibly popular in Latin America–some 71% of searches were for a single person.

Chart 4: Looking at bookings for the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, 58% of searches are for trips six days or longer and it’s nearly an even split between solo searches and searches for groups of two or more travelers. In Latin America, 83% of holiday season bookings made in 2015 were made during Q3.

Chart 5: Remembering these are for searches and not bookings, during Q3 Madrid, Spain was the most-searched destination for holiday season travel for Latin American travelers, followed by Bogota, Colombia and Cancun, Mexico.

Chart 6: There’s only minor fluctuation between actual bookings and searches during Q3 for holiday season travel. Bogota was the top-booked destination, followed by Madrid and São Paulo, Brazil.

Source: Sojern