Weathering the storms: how weather impacts online behaviour

Batten down the hatches…again!

The UK seems to be living in a never-ending storm at the moment. We’ve had Dudley. Then Eunice rolled into town with its 122mph winds. Franklin was the most recent, and Gladys; Herman; Imani; Jack; Kim are all lurking in wait, ready to cause us more woe.

Eunice caused the most chaos, as our fair country once again showed that at the sign of any weather that isn’t a slight drizzle, it just completely collapses. It also meant we had a bit of a repair job on our hands.

A few weeks ago, we saw a spike in activity when it came to searches for “fence panels” on Google, as people assessed the damage. 

Extreme weather is something that we’re going to have to get used to, and this, in turn, will influence consumer behaviour.

Towards the end of last year, our Digital Demand Tracker saw searches for “wood-burning stoves” soar by 36%!  Are we going old-school to keep warm?  Electricity shortages, higher bills and storm disruption probably helped with this spike in “vintage” domestic heating but it might have also been that they do look rather nice in your living room…

We’ve also seen an increase in searches for kayaks (45.14%) since the beginning of the year. New hobbies or a case of preparing for the inevitable flood? You decide.

What else do us Brits do, when the weather is bad? We start planning our holiday getaways! Nothing gets us searching for sunnier climes than a bout of terrible weather. 

Since the start of the year, online travel agents are all seeing triple-figure spikes in online searches. Expedia Group is up 191%, Booking.com up 253% and Skyscanner up 205%. 

And it looks like we’re all heading to Greece, with searches up 210% compared to last year.

Obviously a big caveat here – we were in the midst of a lockdown at the start of 2021…