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Data: Destinations that were way more popular outside the U.S. than inside the U.S. in 2022

Updated: Oct 6, 2023


Image by Away Clinic | Free to use with attribution

There are quite a few differences between where U.S. travelers like to go and where the rest of the world likes to travel to. Using Google Trends we can dig into that and see the differences. In the list that follows you will find the destination countries with the largest difference between popularity worldwide and popularity inside the U.S. So #1, Egypt, is super popular worldwide but far less so to U.S. travelers in 2022. In parentheses, you will see the globally most searched for city in terms of accommodations for each destination country.

  1. Egypt (Hurghada)

  2. Croatia (Poreč)

  3. Belgium (Brussels)

  4. Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur)

  5. Poland (Kraków)

  6. Saudi Arabia (Mecca)

  7. Hungary (Budapest)

  8. Bulgaria (Sunny Beach)

  9. Czech Republic (Prague)

  10. Cyprus (Ayia Napa)

  11. Morocco (Marrakesh)

  12. Turkey (Istanbul)

  13. Sweden (Stockholm)

  14. China (Shanghai)

  15. Singapore (Singapore)

  16. Indonesia (Kuta Selatan)

  17. Denmark (Copenhagen)

  18. Netherlands (Amsterdam)

  19. Portugal (Lisbon)

  20. Spain (Barcelona)

Note that the map image above shows these destination countries highlighted in blue. The higher on the list, the darker they appear.

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Data Source: The data comes from Google Trends.

Data Processing:

  1. Get Google search volume for international accommodations for (a) U.S. Google users and (b) global Google users for all of 2022.

  2. Rank destination countries from 1 to 50 with 1 being highest search volume and 50 being lowest. Do this for both the U.S. google users and the global Google users.

  3. Subtract the U.S. rank from the global rank and sort from highest to lowest

  4. Select the top 20 and rank them from 1 (largest difference between global and U.S. demand) to 20 (smallest difference between global and U.S. demand)

  5. Use Google Trends to find the globally most searched for accommodation city in each of the 20 countries

About the author


Aaron Charlton, PhD is a science and medical blogger and entrepreneur. He writes for Away Clinic and other medical clients. He also maintains a website called OpenMKT.org that is aimed at improving transparency and quality of scientific research within the field of marketing. He is sometimes quoted by the media on matters of scientific integrity.


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