With a viewer base of 6.4 million, it’s no wonder that traffic to the city’s tourism website experienced a huge surge following Monday night’s showing of “The Bachelor” featuring a contestant from our coastal city. The show’s crew was in town this past November to film bachelorette Lauren Burnham of Virginia Beach and this season’s bachelor, auto racer Arie Luyendyk, Jr. In Monday night’s episode, the couple visited Virginia Beach so Luyendyk could meet Burnham’s family. They were filmed enjoying horseback riding on the beach, climbing the lighthouse and having dinner.
Using Google Trends, we are able to measure interest in a particular topic across Google search in real time. The visuals below represent search interest relative to the highest point on the chart worldwide for the chosen timeframe. A value of 100 is the peak popularity for the search term during the chosen timeframe, while a value of 50 means the term is half as popular as the peak.
So how did people react to seeing Virginia Beach on “The Bachelor?” As you can see from the following graphs, from Feb. 15 – Feb. 20 interest in the search term “Virginia Beach” peaked on February 19 during the airing of the show. Likewise, if you look at the data on the day of airing, you can see interest in the search term “Virginia Beach” peaking around 9:16 pm and then spiking slightly again three hours later when the show aired on the West Coast. Not only did the destination see an increase in search interest, but looking at “Virginia Beach horseback riding” as a search term we can clearly see the positive effects of being featured on a show with viewership like that of “The Bachelor.”
