In Turkey, total travel and tourism GDP change (in 2020) is 54.2%, share of total travel and tourism spending 2020 is 47.2% for domestic and 52.8% for international. Moreover, 62 million jobs were lost around the world (− 18.5%). In addition, domestic traveler spending decreased by 45% while international visitor spending decreased by 69.4% as a result of COVID-19. This is relative to a 3.7% GDP decline of the global economy. According to The World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC)’s Economic Impact Report the travel and tourism sector suffered US$4.5 trillion Travel Tourism GDP loss in 2020. In addition, Murugan ( 2013) forecasts a global shift in opted destination of global tourism by 2030 (specifically, a 27% growth in emerging economies).Ĭurrently, the COVID-19 pandemic has negative impact on tourism sector around the world.

When the global tourism movements are examined, it reached 1.5 billion people with an increase of 3.8% compared to the previous year (in 2019) while the number of people participating in international tourism movements in 2005 was 807 million (World Tourism Organization 2020a). The number of tourists in Turkey rank it eighth in the world and fourteenth in terms of tourism revenue (T.C. The figure was $34.5 billion in 2019 (Anadolu Ajansı 2020). Although Turkey’s total tourism income was $13.854 billion in 2003, this figure was $29.512 billion in 2018 (TÜRSAB 2019). Currently, Turkey generates only a small share of the world’s tourism, yet there is tourism potential in Turkey. Tourism sector is also important it in Turkey as it is important in many countries (France, Italy, Spain etc.). This study was conducted on the tourism sector. People have used search engines to get information about brands, services, campaigns and customer comments in the many sectors such as food, health, transportation, banking, tourism. People have done 40.000 search every second on average, 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide on Google (Livestats 2020). Search engine actively used by most people at least a few times. ( 2014) stated that search engine data offer important advantages such as revealing preferences in real time, providing data at a relatively high frequency, and tracking changes in consumers’ preferences. Therefore, the data attract their attention (Jun and Park 2017 Dinis et al. The search query data are important for both researchers and practitioners because they provide more information about consumer search behaviors. However, a topic query returns related search-terms. A search-term query returns searches for an exact search-term (in any language).

However, 100 shows that the day had the most searches for the specific term. Zero shows that searches made by very few people. Google Trends makes an index for user’s search intensity based on over the time period requested in a geographical area. Search engine data have helped researchers to investigate a variety of past and now issues and to forecast future trends (Padhi and Pati 2017). Google Trends provides unfiltered sample of actual search requests made to Google. It shows the relative search volume of popular search terms over time and so reflects individuals’ interest by particular search terms across different regions and topical domains (Höpken et al. It can be filtered by category, search type, geographic location and time range. Google Trends launched by Google in 2006. Google’s search engine gathers the web search traffic information of individuals and provides it in Google Trends. Searching for information on search engines reduces consumers’ uncertainty in purchase-related decision-making, maximizes their satisfaction, and takes less time (You et al. In recent years, consumers’ searches on the Internet have played an important role in their purchasing decisions.

Google trends profile link