Composite indicators for measuring the online search interest by a tourist destination

Abstract

This chapter presents a methodology for building composite indicators to measure the public online search interest by tourist destinations. As an example, we have applied it to measure the online search interest of foreign markets, namely Spain, the UK and Germany by Portugal as a tourist destination. In order to build the composite indicators we extracted weekly and during one year, data from the Google Trends (GT) tool, based on the set of search terms chosen to define the destination Portugal. The composite indicators proposed are based on the Tourism Satellite Accounts (TSA) conceptual framework and weighted by the arithmetic mean of seven primary indicators composed by fifteen sub-indicators. The results indicate the interest and popularity of Spanish, British and German foreigners by tourism in Portugal and country specific touristic products. The obtained results contribute definitively to support and help Destination Management Organizations (DMO) enabling timely decisions.