| Summary: | Over the last years, we observed an exponential growth in the
number of tourism consumers that use the Internet as a source of
information during a destination selection process. Google Trends
is a tool that displays data, almost in real time, on the interest of
people in a particular topic based on search trends. This paper
demonstrates that Google Trends is a tool that can provide useful
and relevant information about the interests of individuals in
relation to domestic tourism destinations at national and regional
levels. Our findings indicate that overnights spent in hotel
establishments by the residents in Portugal are strongly correlated
with the Google index, mainly in mainland Portugal, Alentejo and
Algarve regions, and that the results improve when more
municipalities names and the national or the regional tourism
brands are included as search terms.
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