Complete Market Research Guide for Travel Agencies

A travel agency sells something it does not fully control. The agency chooses the destinations, builds the packages, answers the questions and handles the problems, but the trip itself happens in hotels, on tours, with guides and transfers run by other people. When a traveler comes home happy or disappointed, the reason may sit with the agency, with a supplier or with the destination itself.

That is why an agency needs research on two levels. The first is about the agency: how travelers describe planning with you, booking, the communication before departure, the help they got when something went wrong and how you compare with other agencies and with booking online on their own. The second is about what you sell. Travelers write in detail about the hotels, tours, guides and experiences in your packages, and those reviews are product research for an agency, because they show which parts of a trip delight people and which ones put your name at risk.

This guide shows how an independent travel agency, tour operator or specialist trip planner can turn both kinds of feedback into real market research about its own business, its competitors and the travel market it serves.

Key Research Questions

Research starts with the questions it has to answer. For a travel agency, they fall into three groups: questions about your own agency and its travelers, questions about the other ways travelers could plan the same trip, and questions about how travel demand in your niche is changing.

Your Agency

The first questions follow the traveler. Why did they come to an agency at all: a complicated itinerary, a first trip to a region, a group to organize, a special occasion or simply a wish not to plan everything themselves? What happened at each stage, from the first inquiry and the proposal to booking, the information before departure, the trip itself and the return? Which moments do travelers mention when they explain a five-star review, and which when they explain a one-star review?

The second set is about the product. Which hotels, tours, guides and transfers in your packages do travelers praise, and which do they complain about? Which destinations produce the happiest travelers, and which generate the most problems? These questions decide what goes into next season's catalog, and travelers have usually answered them already in reviews of the places you send them.

Your Competitors

Your competitors include other agencies and tour operators in your niche, but also the online platforms where travelers can book flights, hotels and tours themselves, and the option of planning the whole trip alone with a few websites and a forum. What do travelers praise in those alternatives that your reviews never mention? What do they complain about that you already do well? Reviews of other agencies are as public as yours, and travelers often explain why they chose an agency this time or why they will book on their own next time.

The Travel Market

The third group is about demand. Which destinations and types of trips are travelers asking about? How do they feel about package prices, flexible booking and cancellation terms? What do they expect an agency to offer that they cannot get by booking online? These questions are hard to answer from bookings alone, because those numbers show what travelers did, while their reasons sit in what they write.

Sources of Evidence

Evidence about a travel agency comes from several places, and none of them has to come first. You can analyze reviews without running a survey, and you can study competitors before you have interviewed a single traveler. The strongest research combines what your own travelers tell you, what travelers write in public about agencies and about the places they visit, and what you learn by asking.

Your Own Traveler Feedback

Post-trip surveys, emails, messages to your team during the trip, complaints and notes from guides are the most direct feedback an agency has. Messages sent during the trip are especially useful, because they show problems at the moment they happen, before the traveler decides how to describe the trip afterwards. Collected in one spreadsheet with columns for the date, the destination, the package, the supplier and the type of traveler, they become the start of a customer feedback analysis practice.

Agency and Destination Reviews

Trustpilot reviews of agencies and tour operators describe the business: how planning felt, how clearly prices and terms were explained, how changes and refunds were handled. Google reviews describe the same things for agencies with an office travelers visit, with each branch listed separately. Tripadvisor covers both levels, with reviews of tour operators and reviews of the attractions, tours and experiences you include in your packages. Booking.com reviews show how travelers describe the hotels you work with. Reddit and YouTube add longer discussions, where travelers compare agencies with planning alone and share what they would do differently.

Surveys and Interviews

Traditional methods still have a place. A short survey after the trip can ask what the traveler expected and where the trip matched or missed it. A conversation with a repeat client, or with someone who booked once and never returned, shows what made the difference. Guides, drivers and local partners are another source, because they see how travelers react on the ground. Notes from these conversations are qualitative research, and they need the same structured analysis as reviews to become more than a set of impressions.

Researching Travel Agencies with Kimola

Kimola is an AI platform that turns customer feedback into enterprise-grade market research. For a travel agency, that means taking reviews of your agency and of the agencies you compete with, together with reviews of the hotels, tours and experiences you sell and your own post-trip feedback, and turning them into a structured study of why travelers choose an agency, where the trip goes right or wrong and which parts of your product deserve more or less of your catalog. The steps below follow the order a researcher would work in, and you can start with a free account, without a credit card.

Building the Dataset

After signing up, go to the Create your report area on the Home screen and paste the link to your agency's page on Trustpilot, Tripadvisor or Google Business. With the Add Multiple option you can paste several links, one per line, and Kimola collects the reviews from all of them into a single dataset. A practical first report includes your agency and three or four agencies your travelers compare you with. A second report can include the Tripadvisor pages of the tours and attractions in your most important package. The support article on creating a report by adding links walks through each screen.

For Booking.com hotel pages, Reddit threads and YouTube videos, Kimola's browser extension, Airset Generator, collects the feedback from a page and sends it to your account as an Airset, which you can turn into a report. Your own feedback can be uploaded as an .xls, .xlsx, .csv or .tsv file. If the file has columns such as destination, package, supplier, traveler type or date, Kimola reads them, and you can filter and compare the results by those values.

By default, Kimola finds the themes in the data itself, which matters in travel, where what people write about depends so much on the destination and the kind of trip.

Choosing Dimensions

Dimensions are the research questions Kimola asks of every piece of feedback. You choose them when you create the report or add them later, and the guide to Dimensions explains each one. For a travel agency, five are especially useful.

Experience Stages places each comment at a moment in the trip: planning, booking, communication before departure, the trip itself and the return. Because travelers usually say when things went wrong, this Dimension separates problems the agency controls, such as slow answers or unclear documents, from problems that happened at the destination. Pain Points asks what goes wrong, which in this category often covers hidden costs, changes to the itinerary, poor transfers, hotels that did not match the description and slow refunds.

Personas groups travelers by who they are, which in this category usually separates couples, families, solo travelers, groups of friends, older travelers and business travelers. Each group judges the same package differently. Motivations asks why they traveled and why they chose an agency, such as a honeymoon, a once-in-a-lifetime trip, a wish to avoid planning or a destination that feels difficult to visit alone. Substitutions shows what travelers compare you with: planning on their own, online booking platforms or another agency.

Reading the Report

The Overview shows the main themes in the feedback and how sentiment is distributed. Kimola finds those themes in the data itself instead of sorting comments into a fixed list of categories, so a review can be tagged with something as specific as airport transfers that arrived late or a guide who spoke only some of the group's languages.

Each review can mention several themes, and each theme gets its own sentiment. A traveler who loved the itinerary but was frustrated that nobody answered the phone when a flight was canceled contributes a positive mention of the itinerary and a negative mention of support during the trip. A single star rating would hide that the product and the service around it are being judged separately.

The Performance screen ranks themes with a Satisfaction Score and a Dissatisfaction Score. These scores account for how many reviews mention a theme as well as the percentage, so a theme backed by five reviews does not outrank one backed by fifty. This protects against the most common mistake in small-scale research, which is changing the catalog because of a handful of strong opinions.

Signals

Signals are findings that have passed a statistical test. Kimola crosses every theme and Dimension with the columns in your dataset, such as agency, platform, star rating or date, and checks whether a topic is discussed more often or more negatively in one group than in the others (Differences) or more often recently than before (Trends). Only significant results become Signals, and they are ranked so the most important ones come first. The explanation of how Signals are tested covers the method in more detail.

For a travel agency, the destination and supplier columns are especially revealing. A Difference might show that complaints about transfers are concentrated in one destination, or that one hotel produces far more negative comments than the others in the same package. A Trends Signal can show that comments about cancellations grew in a particular season, or that praise for a guide disappeared after a change of partner. Signals need enough feedback and at least some selected Dimensions. When the data does not contain a pattern strong enough to report, the report shows none, which is an honest result.

Compare

Compare puts segments of a report side by side: different agencies, different platforms, or one-star and five-star reviews. Up to five can be compared at once, without using extra queries. In a report built with Add Multiple, the most valuable use is placing your agency next to the agencies your travelers compare you with and seeing the volume of feedback, the sentiment, the themes you share and the themes that appear for only one agency. In a report on the product, the same feature can place the hotels or tours in one package side by side. If travelers keep praising a competitor's support during the trip and your reviews never mention support at all, that is a decision waiting to be made.

Action Plans

Action Plans turn the findings into steps. You start by choosing or creating a Profile that describes your agency, the destinations it sells and the travelers it serves, then select a perspective: Our own offering, A rival or Our market. These match the three groups of questions at the beginning of this guide. A sensible first plan uses Our own offering with the Customer Experience goal, which focuses on planning, communication and support. Once your report includes other agencies, a plan with the Competitive Strategy goal focuses on how to position your agency against them, and a plan with the Product Development goal focuses on destinations, packages and suppliers.

Kimola builds hypotheses from the report, tests each one against the feedback and drops the actions the evidence does not support. Each remaining action comes with a confidence level and explains why it matters, who it is for, when and where to act, the risk involved and how to see that it worked, along with the evidence behind it. A plan contains up to 12 actions. Plans work best when the report already has Signals, as the support article on how actions are built explains. Kimola's published research on a business travel platform and on a travel eSIM service shows what this kind of analysis looks like when it is applied to travel services.

From Findings to Decisions

Research is only useful if it changes a decision. For a travel agency the decisions are concrete, and each one connects to a specific part of the report.

Destinations and Packages

Catalogs are built a season ahead, and every package carries your name. Reviews of the hotels, tours and experiences in each package show which parts travelers remember warmly and which they describe as the low point of the trip. Motivations and Personas show which travelers each package suits, and Pain Points shows where a package promises more than it delivers. A destination that produces many complaints in a short time may need a different itinerary or a different season.

Guides and Suppliers

Guides, hotels, drivers and local partners shape most of what travelers experience, and travelers often name them. A Difference by supplier shows which partners consistently produce praise and which produce complaints, which is valuable evidence when contracts are renewed. Reviews that mention a guide by name are a privacy matter, so findings like these are best used to improve partnerships and not to blame individuals.

Pricing

Travelers rarely complain about price alone. They complain when the price does not match what they received, or when costs appear that they did not expect, such as local fees, tips or extras that were not included. Pain Points and Experience Stages show where the feeling of poor value begins, and Personas shows whether it is concentrated among families, groups or solo travelers, which points to clearer proposals or different package options.

Cancellations and Changes

How an agency handles a canceled flight, a closed hotel or a traveler who needs to change dates is often what travelers remember most. Experience Stages shows whether these complaints concentrate before departure, during the trip or afterwards, and Underlying Causes, if you add it, shows whether the problem is the policy itself, how it was explained or how slowly the agency responded. Compare shows how travelers describe the same situations at other agencies.

Value Against Online Platforms

Every agency has to explain why a traveler should not simply book online. Substitutions shows what travelers compare you with, and Motivations shows what they value in an agency: someone to call when things go wrong, local knowledge, a well-paced itinerary or time saved. When travelers who booked with you describe those benefits in their own words, you have the clearest possible statement of your value. When they describe booking on their own next time, their reasons show what needs to change.

Ongoing Research

A single report gives you a snapshot, and an agency changes with every season, destination and partner. Repeating the research after each season, after adding a new destination or changing a key supplier shows whether the change moved the themes it was meant to move. Comparing the same season across years shows whether the trips you sell are getting better for the travelers you care about most.

On paid plans, Feeds keep the research running continuously. A Feed collects public mentions from social media, news sites, blogs, forums, YouTube and review sites, based on the keywords and links you define. Alerts email your team when something important happens, and Mailings send a regular summary. Over time, Trends Signals show which topics are rising and which are fading.

Tour Operators and Travel Groups

Larger tour operators and travel groups face the same questions across many brands, destinations, markets and suppliers. On the Enterprise plan, each source of feedback, such as a brand, a destination, a support channel or a post-trip survey, can become a Space, a continuously growing source of feedback classified with the same Funnel, which is a shared set of custom models and Dimensions. Because every source is analyzed the same way, results stay comparable over time and between destinations. Spaces also calculate an NPS from what travelers write, on a scale from -100 to 100. It is derived from the positive and negative share of written feedback, so it is not the same as a Net Promoter Score from a 0 to 10 survey, and NPS targets can be set for each destination or brand.

When a finding needs action, Tasks assign it to the right team, such as product, operations or customer service, with the underlying feedback attached as evidence, and Tasks can be sent to Jira. After a Task is closed, Kimola measures feedback on the same topic again two and four weeks later, so a change can be checked against what travelers say afterwards. Executive summary screens give leadership a single view of what travelers are saying across the organization. Enterprise accounts are set up together with a dedicated Account Manager, and you can request a demo to discuss your setup.

Frequently Asked Questions

A few practical questions come up when a travel agency starts researching with customer feedback for the first time.

Should agency reviews and destination reviews be analyzed together?

Usually in separate reports. Reviews of your agency describe your service, while reviews of hotels and tours describe your product, and keeping them apart makes each easier to read. Compare and the destination column then connect the two.

Can small agencies with few reviews use this approach?

Yes. Even with few reviews of your own, the hotels, tours and destinations you sell often have hundreds or thousands of reviews, and other agencies in your niche have their own. Those datasets answer many of the same questions.

How many reviews do I need before the findings mean anything?

There is no fixed threshold, and the ranking on the Performance screen is designed to protect you from small samples by weighing how many reviews support each theme. Adding a few competing agencies to the same report is the easiest way to reach a dataset large enough for Signals.

Getting Started

Your travelers, and the travelers of every agency and destination you work with, have already written down much of what you need to know about what makes a trip worth booking through an agency. Create a free Kimola account, add your agency and a few competitors to a single report, and see at which stage of the trip travelers talk about problems. The market research guides for hotels, car rental companies and museums apply the same approach to neighboring fields, and the market research guide for small businesses covers the method for any industry.