Tourism Insights — Poland

Tourism market research encompasses projects covering the entire travel ecosystem — tour operators, hotels, airlines, booking platforms, tourism organizations, and experience economy companies. These studies analyze traveler motivations, preferences for destinations, accommodation and transport, satisfaction with tourism services, and trends shaping the market.

The tourism industry has returned to growth after the pandemic period, but with fundamentally transformed consumer behaviors. Domestic tourism is gaining importance, alongside bleisure travel (combining business trips with leisure), experience-based travel (thematic trips — culinary, wellness, adventure), and sustainable tourism (ecotravel). Booking digitization is near-universal — over 70% of hotel bookings in Poland are made online, and platforms like Booking.com and Airbnb have restructured the accommodation market.

Typical tourism research projects include: traveler preference studies (destinations, accommodation type, budget, travel style), hotel guest satisfaction surveys (NPS, review analysis, CSAT), new holiday package concept testing, destination image research (how is Poland, the Masurian Lakes, or Zakopane perceived as a destination?), tourist segmentation (backpackers, all-inclusive, luxury, bleisure), seasonal trend monitoring, and booking journey analysis (customer journey from inspiration to reservation).

Methodologically, tourism research must account for strong seasonality — preferences declared in winter (planning phase) may differ from actual summer behaviors (execution). The most commonly used methods are: CAWI on consumer panels (fast, with destination photo presentation capability), CATI (surveys among travel agency customers), face-to-face interviews at hotels and airports (exit surveys), focus groups (testing offer concepts), and online review analysis (scraping and sentiment analysis from Booking, TripAdvisor, Google Maps).

The challenge is the nostalgia effect — travelers evaluating past vacations tend to inflate satisfaction scores (peak-end rule), potentially skewing post-purchase research results. Additionally, tourism is highly emotional — travel decisions are driven more by dreams and social media inspiration than rational calculation, requiring methods that go beyond standard surveys.