Come and say G’day: Using search engine data to understand the dynamics of tourism demand in Australia

The availability of big data from popular search engines in real-time enables policymakers and market participants worldwide to explore global reactions to major events. Australia consistently ranks high on visitors’ considerations and has significant investment in digital tourism campaigns, such as the multichannel Come and Say G’day campaign through digital and content marketing initiatives around the globe. This paper examines the dynamic relationship between Google query search volumes related to travel and tourism demand outcomes using subnational quarterly data for Australian states. Employing a panel vector auto-regression (PVAR) method, we show that a positive shock to the Internet search intensity in travel themes explains over 50% of the variations in visitor nights. This effect is persistent over several quarters after the shock. Our ‘back of the envelope’ calculation suggests that a 10% increase in the Internet search intensity index leads to an increase in tourism GDP by $1.4 million.