I came home from TBEX last month with a head full of questions about my motives and intentions for this blog and what I’m really trying to do with it. What are parents looking for from online travel blogs and websites? What can I offer in that space (in addition to the Traveling With Kids book, of course)? One of the things that I learned while working at Amazon.com is the power of data-driven decisions and so, this weekend I spent some time looking for data on questions parents are asking online about travel with their children. Since I know that many of the readers of this blog are people who also write about travel or family travel, I thought I’d share my findings.
I started my search by looking at portal, community and social media websites for moms. The most recent data set I could find was the Nielson Power Moms report from earlier this year (May 2009) – particularly the ‘Portals and Communities’ list on the last page of the report. Since I have some issues with this data (I’d prefer something more like the Invesp.com’s Blog-Rank which shows data from known sources such as Alexa and Compete), I also used the round-up of social networking sites for moms by socialmediamom.com (from January 2008). I visited each of the websites listed on these rankings and examined their travel offering looking for data on questions or comments submitted by readers on this topic.
Unfortunately, the social networking, portal and community websites which do cover travel as a separate topic do so in a magazine-style format with a rolling list of archived posts under this topic but no further categorization and it looked like brute force (i.e. reading post after post) was going to be the only way I could come up with any initial quantitative data. Cafemom.com was a slight exception in that they also maintain a list of sub-categories: International Travel, Road Trips, Cruises, Military Travel, Disney Vacation but there wasn’t any easy way to count the number of posts, questions or comments within these topics. Finally, I hit pay-dirt with Mamapedia.com where they’ve tagged all the discussions with multiple tags. This led me to ‘Traveling & Kids‘ containing 1400+ questions – submitted by and answered by real moms – grouped into five general topics as shown in the chart above. I considered this a worthy, if small, sample to examine further.
- Using Car Seats on Trips – Particularly on Airplanes (43%)
- How to Entertain Children While Traveling (34%)
- Potty Training While Traveling (14%)
- Kid Travel Health (6%)
- Vacation Destination Recommendations (1%)
I have to admit that I’m surprised by this break-down of topics. Who would have thought that car seats would rank so highly? I’m not surprised by entertainment ranking as a ‘hot topic’ since I’m regularly asked about how I keep my boys entertained when we’re traveling (books and games and the odd electronic indulgence folks). Car seats and Entertainment account for 77% of the questions submitted whereas only 1% of questions relate to destinations or activities at those destinations. This is very intriguing. Are moms of older children (who don’t need car seats) using social media less or do they not research their vacation destinations by posting questions on discussion boards on social media websites for moms (parents)?
I believe that there is another potential data source for study of parent’s questions on family travel: the discussion boards on travel websites such as Lonely Planet’s Thorn Tree or the Traveling With Children message board on Bootsnall. I plan to do a follow-up study using the data from these sources and compare the results in the near future.
Leave a comment and let me know if you have any questions about this little research project or any suggestions on where I could find better data to supplement it (the internet, you know, it’s never-ending…) 
Related Posts:
Handheld Video Games, Kids and Travel
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Great stuff. I also wonder if the families with older kids, ask less kid-related questions. Maybe they just move out of the mom-family groups and just post or search travel information in general terms. Can’t wait what else you find, I go to the Lonely Planet family forums too.
Hmmmm… it is weird. It may just be that parents of older kids haven’t found that particular community. If you’re looking for demand data, it might be worth mining data about what people are searching for. I think that most people with questions just search until they find the answer. Search data all seems to be targeted at people buying SEO keywords. But there’s a lot of data there:
* http://www.seoresearchlabs.com/keyword-metrics.php
* https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
From a quick look at the google adwords data, here are a few thoughts…
* ‘kids city’ and ‘kids top’ are almost as large as ‘kids travel’
* I don’t see any evidence of the super popularity of travelling with a carseat in the search data.
* i suspect that if you did all the math, you’d find that the searches for lots of specific destinations (“kids ireland’, ‘kids europe’, ‘kids hawaii’, ‘kids mexico’) forms a long tail that’s almost as interesting as the few major topics like carseats, the question is how do you build a site deep enough to really help people in that long tail.
I think part of it is that people know where to look for information on destinations. AAA, travel agencies, tourist bureau sites, Disney, TripAdvisor, word-of-mouth–people have ideas about what to do when they’re traveling.
It’s the getting there that’s hard, and it seems that finding information about carseats is more difficult. Laws vary from state to state. We want to be sure we’re getting the best carseat for our child and we’ll ask other moms for help with it. Parents don’t know where to find the information they need, and when they hear the statistic that 80% of carseats are used incorrectly, they turn to the Internet to be sure they’re not doing it wrong. (That being said, as a former Child Passenger Safety Technician, I cringed at a lot of the responses on the board you linked to. Many of them were just plain wrong and sharing their misinformation with others.)
That’s my take on it.
That is very informative, thank you for sharing.
interesting. i can’t imagine that THAT many people are doing car seat searches. yet as carolina said, i think that as kids get older, people find different places to get answers to their questions, and might not use the word kids!?
This is a good reminder of using quantitative data to become better informed. Thanks for sharing this on your blog, I’m ready to get my data mining hat on and dig in along with you.
@Carolina, @Lorraine, @Eve: thanks for your interest – I’ll let you know when I post subsequent articles using data from travel boards and keyword searches.
@Jordan: thanks for slapping me upside the head. I needed that
@Linda: Very good point. Thanks for sharing.
@Jessiev: I agree. Now I’m on a mission to find out where other parents are looking and what they’re looking for
Well, I don’t find it too surprising that car seats are such a prominent topic. Many people need to decide whether or not to take one with them on their trip since it can be quite a hassle to carry one on and off flights. Furthermore, some cities have taxis that provide car seats, in some places it is illegal not to have a car seat in a taxi, etc. There is so much that goes into planning seemingly unimportant details when traveling! When we took our disney vacation last year, we didn’t take the car seat (we were flying) and it was an absolute nightmare! No taxis or car rental places had car seats to rent. Needless to say, this time we bought a stroller with a seat that also works as a car seat.