Going Stir Crazy: The Weekly COVID-19 Update

One month into forced hibernation, we’re starting to see interesting changes in the social media landscape.

Overall, the volume of posts and positive sentiment remains consistent with the previous two weeks – the story is within these posts.

If we look specifically at tourism, wanderlust has been a popular theme for many years, often led by influencers who lead enviable and improbable travel lives. They are still posting, sometimes recycling old content or adding new images and stories from old trips. The content may not be as fresh as it was, but people are hungry for it. There has been a rapid increase in the number of people interacting with wanderlust posts: liking, commenting and sharing more and more.

We appear to be seeing the early stages of people being ready to travel again. The first step in the customer journey is to dream about where they want to go, and people are starting to dream. We’re not yet seeing people moving en masse to the next step of the journey and start planning a trip. We don’t yet know how far they want to go, for how long or how much they can afford to spend.

Here’s a family that was able to overcome travel restrictions last weekend and offered their daughters the ski vacation of a lifetime: Until we can get back to the slopes.