Holiday Extras unveils new destination tracker tool

New technology shows which destinations are rising and falling in popularity in real-time

Ancillaries provider Holiday Extras has unveiled the launch of its Real-Time Destination Tracker tool, to show holidaymakers live data on holiday spots that are rising or falling in popularity. 

The first tool of its kind available publicly, uses three years’ worth of booking data from millions of Holiday Extras’ customers to draw attention to lesser-known gems that are only starting to get attention, and old favourites experiencing declining interest. 

The tracker, that is updated once a week, uses the most up-to-date data on the market, to help holidaymakers make informed decisions on where to go. 

Before it developed the tool, Holiday Extras used its data to successfully predict a huge rise in holidays to Albania and other lesser-known city breaks in Europe including Zadar, Kotor and Tivat.

It is powered by the same team behind Holiday Extras’ own app and SYD (Search Your Documents), an insurance explainer tool launched earlier this year that makes understanding insurance policies simple. 

The tracker’s most recent data revealed that overall bookings to Greece are in decline by 40%, likely due to the natural disasters last year. 

However, some individual islands are up in popularity - especially as shoulder-season breaks - Zante is up by 826%, Heraklion by 487% and Kefalonia by a massive 1,600%. 

Newly popular exotic destinations, including Barbados, Gambia and Sri Lanka, are also rising significantly. 

As expected, policies to limit tourism in Barcelona and Amsterdam have seen these destinations see a notable drop-off, down 14% and 11% respectively.

David Norris, chief growth officer of Holiday Extras, said: “Our mission at Holiday Extras is to help people turn their ordinary trips into extraordinary journeys. 

"We help more than eight million travellers a year with their trips, and that gives us access to an unrivalled wealth of independent trip data representing the whole of the UK travel market. 

"Our own teams have used that data for years to pinpoint travel trends and recommend the next big destinations to our customers, and now we’re sharing it with everybody.

“By combining our rich data with the technical expertise that built our app, our AI-powered insurance helper and our parking optimisation technology, we’ve developed a Real-Time Destinations Tracker tool that anyone can use to see where’s up, where’s down, and where the next big holiday trend is going to be.”