The UK’s top travel brands—and Brits’ favourite destinations in 2022
The travel industry in the UK began its recovery over the last year under a traffic light system that changed how people travel, where they can go and how businesses facilitate their experiences.
In a new report from YouGov, we evaluate the brands and destinations that managed to break through and resonate powerfully with consumers over the last year.
Using data from YouGov BrandIndex - which measures consumer perceptions toward brands on a daily basis - we determined our Travel Brand Ranking based on each brand’s average Impression score over the course of the last year. Impression is a measure of whether a consumer has a positive or negative impression of a brand.
Premier Inn leads our top travel brands in the UK with an average net Impression score of 39.9. The hotel chain operator saw its
third-quarter sales rise by 3.1% for UK hotels
and expects sales in the country to fully recover this year.
It was a challenging year, filled with restrictions being lifted and reimplemented, but this is a cause to celebrate the travel brands that managed to shine amid this period.
Consumer affinity over the last year was also strong for runner-up British Airways (BA) which tends to perform well in YouGov’s rankings. Taken together with Premier Inn, the two travel brands demonstrate that there’s a place for both quality and value in our Impression ranking.
The only two other airlines to make the ranking this year are Emirates (27.4) and Virgin Atlantic (24.1). London Heathrow Airport (LHR) sits at number eight on the list with an Impression score of 22.7. The airport announced a decade-long initiative - Heathrow 2.0 Connecting People and Planet—to focus on net zero aviation and on ensuring the airport is a great place to work.
Three hotel chains earn a spot in the top ten this year, with Hilton and Marriott joining Premier Inn. Hilton was recently recognized as one of the
World’s Best Workplaces by Fortune
, ranking third on the list and the only hospitality company to earn the honour.
Three travel agencies make this year’s ranking led by Booking.com (26.4) in the number five spot and TUI (20.9) and Tripadvisor (20.5) in at nine and ten, respectively.
Get in touch to see where your brand or destination—and your competitors’—ranks
Top destinations for British travellers in 2022
As for the places that resonate most strongly with British consumers, the data suggests a strong appetite for foreign travel to European countries.
Italy comes out on top, eking out a lift in Impression of +3.5-points in January 2022 compared to the same period last year. Spain is this year’s biggest improver by far, registering a jump in score (+6.8-points) nearly twice that of the second-best improver—Denmark (+3.9-points).
Canada, which led the ranking this time last year fell by 6.4-points but still manages to take the number three spot in this year’s Destination Rankings. With the exception of Canada, all the other destinations in the top ten are European.
Download YouGov’s Brand and Destination Rankings 2022 report for deeper insights into what the year has in store for travel companies and destinations around the globe
Methodology
The data included in the YouGov Travel and Tourism Brand and Destination Rankings 2022 has been drawn from YouGov BrandIndex and YouGov DestinationIndex respectively. The markets included in this report are UK, US, China, Japan, Germany, UAE, Indonesia, France and Australia.
For the brand ranking, brands were ranked based on their Impression score, which is a measure of whether a consumer has a positive or negative impression of a brand calculated by taking the average net score for the year of 2021 (1st January 2021 – 31st December 2021). Consumers were asked “Which of the following brands do you have a positive impression of?”, then "Which of the following brands do you have a negative impression of?".
For the destination ranking, consumers were asked “Overall, which of the following destinations do you have a positive impression of?” then "Overall, which of the following destinations do you have a negative impression of?". The score shown is the average net score from January 2022 vs. January 2021.
The brand and destination rankings charts show those brands/destinations which received the highest average score. The scores for both the brand and destination ranking are representative of the general population of adults 18+ for all markets (Indonesia and China are online representative).
All scores listed have been rounded to a single decimal place; however, we have used additional precision to assign ranks. All brands must be tracked for at least six months to be included in either ranking.
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