Holidays & Travel Brand Index 2019 Q3

Every quarter we survey British consumers on their brand awareness and preferences in relation to the holidays and travel industry. Our latest insights into this industry can be found below. Plus, in Q1 of each year we dive deeper into the data to create an in-depth report on the state of the industry.

To jump straight to our 2019 Holidays & Travel Brand Index Report, click below:

Click to view research

To compile this quarter’s Holidays & Travel Brand Index below, we looked at three things:

• Percentage of unprompted brand recall within the holidays and travel category
• How likely a person is to purchase each brand (Purchase Intent)
• How likely a person is to recommend each brand (Net Promoter Score)

Key Changes in Brand Attributes

Holidays can be stressful at the best of times; finding the best deal, buying and packing the right clothes, budgeting and exchanging your money. Add to that a turbulent summer of flight cancellations and airport strikes in the UK, and consumers might be left wondering if they should just stay at home. 

In this climate, travel brands need to work hard to win and retain the trust of consumers, who spend their hard-earned savings on holidays that are meant to bring positive memories, not memories of long airport stays while they wait for a rearranged flight! 

Each quarter we ask consumers to rank the top 10 holiday and travel brands they’ve named in eight category-specific attributes: reliability, convenience, customer service, price, trust, online presence & website, memorable branding & adverts and variety of trips available. Here are the main winners, losers and movers this quarter:

• Last quarters’ best-performing brand across the eight attributes, TripAdvisor, continues its winning streak in Q3. They retain all five of their top scores, for reliability, convenience, trust, online presence and variety. 
• In Q2 Jet2 took the title for the remaining three attributes, this time the airline receives none of the highest weighted rankings, and instead three other brands take titles. Trivago come out on top as having the most memorable branding and adverts, Booking.com are recognised as offering the best price and Virgin are rewarded for their high standards of customer service. 
• TUI and Thomas Cook still perform poorly in the eight attributes, despite ranking very highly in the overall leaderboard. TUI gives away the title for least trusted brand to easyJet, and the title for least convenient brand to Thomas Cook (making three low scores for the brand overall, including price and online presence).
• Expedia continue to rank in last place for having memorable branding and adverts, which is further seen in their dropping Unprompted Brand Recall score between Q2 and Q3.

Key Takeaways

• TUI is the only brand to retain their position in the top echelons the leaderboard this quarter. While they drop in Total Brand Equity (TBE), they retain first position as this falling TBE is an industry-wide trend. In fact, only one brand out of the 10 (easyJet) manages to increase Total Brand Equity this quarter. TUI perhaps only retain their lead due to an increase in Purchase Intent, bucking the trend as all other brands in the leaderboard drop in this metric. And the bad news continues; only two brands manage to increase their Net Promoter Score. In all, consumers are proving harder to please this quarter. It’s also clear that a brand’s memorability is not positively correlated with favourability metrics like NPS, as TUI have one quarter of the total share of mind of the industry, and yet receive a negative NPS of -2.7.
• Despite these dropping scores, no brand performs poorly enough to drop from the leaderboard entirely, nor does any other brand overtake one of these key industry names, to enter the top 10. 
• EasyJet experience a positive quarter, with increasing Unprompted Brand Recall and NPS driving up their overall TBE, to take them from 10th place in Q2 to 7th place overall this quarter. 

The Full Report

The report includes:

• The UK’s leading holiday and travel brands for Awareness, Purchase Intent and Net Promoter Score
• Overall Brand Strength and Total Brand Equity index
• Industry averages and market dynamics
• Key takeaways for the UK holiday and travel industry

The report is based on a nationally representative survey of 1,000 people in the UK (aged 18+), surveyed in January 2019. 

Click to view research

Brand Index Methodology

The Attest Brand Index is a platform agnostic measure of a brand’s total brand equity in the health and wellness sector, as determined by real consumers.

What does that mean?

When we say ‘Platform Agnostic’, we mean the results are not influenced by any particular method of collecting them, like looking exclusively at social media mentions or at brand search terms. This reduces bias and gives us a more accurate view of a brand’s strength in its category.

Learn more about why we think this is the best methodology for Brand Intelligence.

Brand Index data is gathered every quarter from a nationally representative survey to 1,000 UK consumers aged 18-65.