FLORIDA — Florida regularly shows up at or near the top of lists of states used as a topic for vacation or other travel searches online.


What You Need To Know

  • A new report says Floridians are doing the most online travel searches in 2021

  • Travel site Trips to Discover analyzed Google Trends search data for hotels, flights and cruises

  • Florida was also Number One in 2019

A new report by travel website Trips to Discover now shows that Floridians also do a whole lot of Googling for travel plans themselves—in fact, the Sunshine State has done more web searches for hotels, flights and cruises than any other state in America so far this year, as it did throughout the pre-pandemic year 2019.

Trips to Discover analyzed Google Trends data from 2019 and from January 1 through April 8 of this year to track the travel searches residents in all 50 states made during those time frames, focusing on the three aforementioned metrics. The residents of Florida did the most-related surfing in both cases. In 2019, 48% of our searches were flight-related, followed by 42% for hotels and 10% cruises; so far in 2021, hotels have risen to become the top category at 60%, while flight searches dropped to 32% and cruise searches have (understandably) bottomed out at 3%.

The study yielded a few other interesting results. Alabamians have upped their travel search game the most of any state since 2019, rising from 30th to sixth on the list, while Hawaiians may have decided they already live in paradise—their state sank from fifth to 33rd. With regard to cruises, interest has dropped precipitously over the year-plus of COVID; so far in 2021, no state’s searches have risen above 4%.

It’s impossible to tell how much of these searches convert to actual travel, and how much of them are the result of aimless, wishful coronavirus-related cabin-fever clicking. It’s interesting to know, however, that even in one of the most popular travel destinations in the United States, folks are thinking about somewhere else.