Spain leads the world in tourism-related searches

When it comes to tourism, Spain is the world’s leading heavyweight.

Bombarded with the many polls, surveys, statistics and official data available on all things tourism-related, it can sometimes be difficult to determine exactly which country leads the way in certain metrics.

France, for example, constantly likes to claim it is the world’s ‘most-visited’ country, but that is largely in part due to its location between the UK and central Europe and Spain, meaning many people ‘pass through’ France rather than outright visit it…

Overnight stays is another metric often used as a bellweather of a destination’s popularity, and in this regard countries such as Egypt, Greece and Turkey perform well because holidaymakers heading there tend to do so in fortnightly (or longer) stints.

It is this hotchpotch of conflicting and, often, contradictory information that prompted branding experts Bloom Consulting to attempt to analyse, once and for all, exactly which country had the strongest tourism ‘brand’ and was, therefore, the most popular tourist destination in the world.

Having analysed more than one billion online search keywords relating to travel, tourism and investment, Bloom Consulting concluded that Spain is in fact the most popular nation on earth.

The outright tourism category put Spain top of the tree, ahead of Italy in second, Turkey in third, France in fourth and Japan in fifth place. This category referred to keywords relating to all manner of leisure and tourist pursuits, such as “beaches in…” and “restaurants in…” with Spain being the most common country to follow such a request.

In outright “Visit (name of country)” terms, Turkey was the surprising winner, garnering the most amount of generic visit-related searches. And when all five categories were taken into consideration (including investment, exports, talent and national prominence), the U.S. has the strongest national ‘brand’ identity in the world, rather unsurprisingly.

Spain was ninth overall, topping the charts for tourism and comfortably in the top ten for national prominence and talent – the latter point referring to employment, education and general expat opportunities.