Sojern, a leading provider of digital travel marketing solutions, today (13th May) launched a new interactive dashboard providing real-time COVID-19 travel insights. These insights will empower Sojern’s customers, partners and industry leaders to forecast travel demand and make informed decisions about market recovery. Sojern will be providing free and unlimited access to the public via the Sojern website, a service the firm has only ever provided to customers and partners.

The dashboard, updated daily at 10:30pm UTC, will provide market-level details on future searching and booking trends indexed to pre-COVID levels to provide visibility into timing for a recovery in specific destinations. Travel providers can use these insights to help determine when to re-open or when to accelerate marketing to power recovery. Dashboard users will also be able to compare different regions to see when travel is likely to recover in each market.

Sojern decided to make the dashboard public because of the unforeseen popularity our unique travel dataset has generated. People around the world are looking for real-time travel data to help them better understand the impact COVID-19 is having on the global economy.

Sojern director of travel insights Amber Kuo said, “Normally, weekly or even monthly data updates about how consumers are traveling would be acceptable to inform marketing campaigns. However, in COVID times, travel marketers are feeling stressed and uncertain about the future. Providing daily updates gives marketers more control because they can see how the situation is evolving, and when is the right time to act.”

Sojern collects and analyses travel intent data from thousands of airline and hotel partners from around the world to use as the foundation of Sojern’s travel insights. This data provides an unparalleled view of travel demand by looking at online traveler path to purchase.

“Sojern’s insight on demand and search trends is a source of valuable knowledge for those strategising for recovery amidst these turbulent times,” said Far East Hospitality.

 “Our business partnership with Sojern started back in 2018. Last year, Sojern’s data integration with our DSP radically changed the way we deliver our programmatic campaigns and significantly improved our digital performance,” said George Kalliamvakos, digital media manager, Department of Culture and Tourism – Abu Dhabi. “Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Sojern has played an instrumental role in providing insights and data to our organisation that helped us monitor demand and build predictable forecast models and action plans. Our partnership is stronger than ever by exploring multiple data and campaign opportunities. Looking forward to a fruitful 2020.”

“These are extremely challenging times for hotels, the support that Sojern is giving with its big data analysis is priceless. Knowing what the consumer is looking into, helps us shape the investment on sales and marketing activities,” said Rachele Belladelli, sales & marketing consultant for Hotel Rosa Alpina, Tyrol, Albereta, Castel Hortenberg and Paragon 700, Unique Retreats.

 "Sojern's analyses of the public's flight intentions are very interesting because they support us with our revenue forecast during and post-COVID, and therefore for media planning. Never has this been more important, because it has to do with the behaviour of the public and potential customers and represents something completely different from the usual trend analysis of tourist flows that we have been used to in the past,” said Piergiorgio Capozza, group brand marketing and communications manager, Baglioni Hotels.

For more information, visit www.sojern.com/covid-19-insights