App Store Keywords for Travel Apps: Booking Terms vs Trip-Planning Terms

Estimated volume / estimated difficulty, 0-100. Phrases were English in every storefront.

Booking terms share one profile: very high volume, difficulty above 40 almost everywhere, and a US reading near the scale's ceiling (97 to 99). Planning terms are the reverse. "Packing list" is an unusual cell: a volume score of 26 in the US and 20 in Germany with difficulty at or near 0 means some people search for it and few established apps answer. That is a small niche, not a big one, and it may only matter if packing is central to your app.

Travel has one of the cleanest genre matches in the study: 93.3% of US results were Travel apps, so the competition you see for these phrases is really other travel apps. Even so, our mapping is approximate across categories. The median rating count equals the study median, but the spread across storefronts is large: about 86,300 in the US against 742 in Japan and 1,124 in Brazil. A third of top-10 names repeat the full query; in Germany it is 18%.

1. Match the keyword to the stage of the trip. Booking terms carry high demand and high difficulty; planning, packing and guide terms carry less demand but far less difficulty. A new app is usually better off describing what it does at one stage than competing for every stage.
2. Time matters. Travel interest rises and falls with seasons and holidays, and a single-day measurement cannot show that. Read seasonal App Store keywords before treating a low score as permanent.
3. Localize the listing, not just the keywords. "City guide" is 0 in Japan in this English test, but that says nothing about the Japanese equivalent. See localizing a listing without translating the app.
4. Choose your category honestly. Apple's Guideline 2.3.5 requires the most appropriate category and Apple may change it. Offline maps and route tools may be a better fit for Navigation; local forecasts for Weather; and restaurant finders for Food & Drink.

For each of 26 categories we picked six English phrases and queried the iTunes Search API (entity=software, limit=25) in the US, GB, DE, JP, FR and BR, analysing the top 10 results: 36 queries, 360 slots per category, fetched 2026-11-01. Details are in the research methodology, on the research hub and under how we measure. Data: category CSV.

LocalASO is a Mac app that estimates volume and difficulty for 52 storefronts, each in its local language. A license costs $29 once; the download is free but the app needs a license key to run. See pricing.