Brandwatch Bulletin: One Ticket to Hope, Please

Are we starting to feel more confident?

Welcome back to the Brandwatch Bulletin after the Easter break. Today we’re looking at how people are talking about things they’ve booked.

Let’s get to it.

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An appointment with disaster

From holidays to hair appointments, we’ve seen a lot of bookings postponed and cancelled since March 2020.

But with vaccine deployment increasing and restrictions decreasing in some places, we wondered if people were starting to gain confidence around organizing holidays, meals, and manicures again.

To figure this out, we created a query in Brandwatch Consumer Research that picked up any mentions of the phrase “I booked” on Twitter, Reddit, and Tumblr. We expected to see a big drop off in this conversation after the pandemic was declared, with it tentatively rising in recent months.

As often happens with experiments, your initial hypothesis can be way off the mark.

We instead found that people talked about their bookings 23% more in 2020 compared to the previous year. But if people weren’t able to book as many things as before, what was going on?

When we analyzed this data by sentiment, we started to get some answers. The big spike in mentions in March 2020 also offers a hint.

It turns out our initial prediction was based on an unrealistically positive view of the “I booked” conversation. While there are plenty of mentions from people excited about trips and tattoos, there are just as many people making complaints about their bookings.

Unsurprisingly, with Covid-19 causing cancellations throughout 2020 across a range of industries, complaints about bookings went up on social media, therefore increasing the volume of the whole conversation. This explains the big spike in March 2020 when a lot of pre-made plans were given the chop.

This tallies with the results of our recent customer experience report which found that many industries saw lots of pandemic-induced complaints.

But it’s not all bad. In fact, one half of our hypothesis was still correct. Here’s how the “I booked” data looks split out by sentiment.

In March of this year, positive “I booked” mentions overtook negative ones for the first time since October 2019. And they’re ahead by a decent amount too.

When we looked into the mentions, the big booking topics were no surprise – flights, trips, hair appointments, and massages topping the list. But importantly, we also saw a lot of people referring to making these bookings after they’ve had their vaccinations.

This suggests consumer confidence in the hospitality and travel industries is slowly returning, but for many people hope hinges on vaccination. For all the related companies who have been struggling since the first day of pandemic, the above data is a sign of the good news they’ve been waiting for.

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Stay safe,

The Brandwatch React team

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