Brandwatch Bulletin #122: Festivals, Flights, and Complaints

New outfits and travel pillows at the ready.

17 June 2022

We recently published our report on consumer trends in the hospitality industry. For today’s bulletin we’re exploring two of its big findings.

Let’s get to it.

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Big events, big comebacks

Whether it was a star-studded, multi-field extravaganza or your local ale and cider festival, the pandemic put them all on pause. This has caused untold damage to the entertainment industry with the repercussions still felt today.

But 2022 brings some good news. Many events that we’ve missed out on for two years have returned, and it doesn’t look like they’re struggling to attract the crowds. For example, if we look at mentions of Coachella during the festival this year, they’re way up.

2022’s Coachella mentions were up 86% on 2019’s, and were by far the highest for the years we looked at. The event, unsurprisingly, sold out. But it did in 2019 too, so why the uptick in mentions this time around?

It’s hard to say for certain but after an entertainment drought, fans may just be more excited to share their experiences online and add some action to their feeds.

This is excellent publicity for the festival itself, and works nicely for inducing some live music FOMO in those watching via social. That means it may have a knock on effect to the wider industry. It follows that someone seeing a friend at a gig on Instagram will be encouraged to explore live music events they can attend.

And to show Coachella wasn’t alone in this trend, we also took a look at Barcelona’s Primavera Sound festival. Taking place from June 1 – 12, we collected mentions during the festival and also from the build up before it.

Again we see a high level of posts about the festival for 2022, although it’s pipped to the top post by 2016. Regardless, there’s a clear recovery trend taking place after 2020 saw the festival cancelled.

There’s another aspect to the data though. The number of Spanish people posting about the festival was nearly the same in 2021 and 2022. It’s the English-language mentions behind the jump. This not only tells us that festivals are on the up, but international travel is too.

Which brings us to our next section.

Differing expectations

We don’t need to rely on international festival mentions to know people are getting back on planes. According to the US’s Transport Security Administration data, more people are flying than they were at the same time last year, although levels have yet to return to where they were in 2019.

That may soon change though with a recent marked increase in search interest for flights.

Tallying with the TSA’s numbers, flight interest isn’t where it was pre-pandemic, but it’s growing fast. The last few weeks have seen a big jump suggesting a lot of people are planning their next getaway.

Of course, with flights often come hotels. This brings us to our second finding from our recent hospitality report. Using Brandwatch Consumer Research we found mentions about people’s experiences at hotels, and then split the data out into two groups: the general public and business professionals.

We then segmented the mentions into three aspects of the hotel experience. It’s safe to say the two groups have some differences.

Business professionals are far more negative about their hotel experiences, unless they’re talking about breakfast. For the general public the biggest negative share for one of the aspects we studied was only 23%, whereas for our business types it was 53%. A thought and a prayer for all the hoteliers when a business conference comes to town.

This suggests that either business professionals have a higher standard, or they’re more likely to post about their negative experiences. Either way this means business travellers carry an extra PR risk if they feel a hotel hasn’t lived up to their standards.

At least they’re happy about breakfast though. Or maybe it’s just too early for them to Tweet about it.

Get more hospitality sector data

Our new hospitality report offers an in-depth look at what consumers are saying online, revealing new trends and changing behaviors.

Read it now, for free, here.

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Stay safe,

The Brandwatch Bulletin team

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