Introducing the ETC New Media Trend Watch

The internet has revolutionised the way in which consumers make their travel decisions. Web-based marketing campaigns have become an increasingly important means of promoting destinations and tourism services. Social networking websites provide forums for tourists to discuss the places they have visited. More and more people are booking online.

New Media Trend Watch has been created to help keep European tourism marketing professionals fully up to date on trends in internet usage by tourism consumers across the world. As well as the latest tourism and travel news stories on online marketing and ecommerce, it offers research reports and white papers, a free newsletter and a unique graph service for comparing country data. And all this is entirely free of charge, courtesy of the European Travel Commission.

Graphs & Statistics Germany, Russia, UK, France and Italy were the top 5 countries with the highest number of internet users in Europe at mid-year 2012, according to Internet World Stats.

Newsflash Slow steady growth is expected for US digital travel sales overall, but mobile booking will grow sharply 63% of US tablet users will make a purchase on the device in 2013 Luxembourg, Denmark and the Netherlands are the European leaders in level of people with daily internet access Smartphone ownership in the UK has gone mainstream The ‘Young and free’ is the life stage group the most like to have mobile broadband in Ireland