Travel funnels from the other side: Naver, Google Maps and reviews paid in gifts in Korea

Part of Travel funnels from the other side, a series on what I learn as a traveller about the booking funnels I usually measure.

In June 2026 I travelled around South Korea. After years of measuring how customers search, book and pay, it was the second trip where I watched myself do it in a market that works differently. The first was Chile and Brazil in 2024. Korea was harder, and more interesting for anyone who works in travel.

Finding my way without Google

Google Maps shows places in Korea, but it would not give me walking or driving directions. The reason is a long-running dispute over taking detailed map data out of the country (background on Wikipedia). In February 2026 the government approved Google's request under strict conditions, but in June the directions still did not work for me. So I did what Koreans do: I moved around with Naver Map and KakaoMap, and I searched on Naver.

Within a couple of days most of my trip happened on Korean platforms. The searches I made, the places I saved and the routes I followed never touched the tools a Western travel brand usually measures.

Booking and paying as a foreigner

Two things stopped me again and again. Many websites asked for a Korean phone number to verify the account, and my foreign card was rejected on several of them. I had seen the same pattern in Chile: the customer is there, wants to pay, and the form decides they cannot.

A gift for a review

The thing that surprised me most happened in shops and restaurants. Several of them offered me a small gift if I left a review on Google or on Naver.

Google's rules for Maps reviews do not allow this. Its Maps content policy lists offering incentives in exchange for reviews as fake engagement. I do not know how strictly Naver applies its own rules, and I am not judging the businesses, which were following what looked like a common local practice. As an analyst, what I noticed was the effect on the data: a rating built partly on rewarded reviews means something different from a rating built on unprompted ones.

What a travel company could take from it

If I worked on the data side of a travel brand selling into Korea, I would look at three things.

1. Search demand outside Google. A brand that measures and bids only on Google sees part of the market. Naver has its own search ads and its own webmaster tool, Naver Search Advisor, and the queries that matter may only show up there.
2. Review data as a data quality question. If ratings feed a ranking, a recommendation or an analysis that compares markets, they need context: where incentives are common, a 4.8 is a different number. Sudden jumps in the number of reviews for one venue are worth flagging before anyone reads the average.
3. The checkout for foreign customers. Errors by form field, split by the visitor's country, show quickly when a phone verification step or a card check is turning away people who wanted to buy.

A question to finish

When you compare ratings or search demand across countries, do you know which platform each market really uses, and how its reviews were collected?

Travel funnels from the other side: buses in Santiago and a flight to Rio

Part of Travel funnels from the other side, a series on what I learn as a traveller about the booking funnels I usually measure.

In November 2024 I travelled through Chile, from Santiago down to the northern part of Chilean Patagonia, and then flew from Santiago to Rio de Janeiro. I have spent years measuring checkout funnels. On this trip I was the customer who dropped out of them, more than once.

The bus that kept disappearing

The hardest part of the trip was buying bus tickets in Santiago. On the platform I was using, buses appeared in the results and then disappeared. When I found one, the form asked for a RUT, the Chilean tax ID that a visitor does not have, so the purchase never finished.

Later I learned what I had been using. Recorrido and Kupos are marketplaces that resell tickets from many bus companies, and Recorrido has belonged to the Canadian company Busbud since 2022 (LatamList). Neither is a bus company's own site or an official government service, and each works with different operators, which is why they showed me different types of bus. Other travellers describe the same RUT wall (Tour du Mondiste).

In the end, everyone I asked gave me the same advice: go to the Pajaritos terminal and buy the ticket there, and avoid Estación Central. The advice has a basis. Carabineros list the Estación Central metro station and the Santiago bus terminal among the city's theft hotspots (Meganoticias, 2022). Pajaritos is a smaller terminal in Lo Prado, on the west side of the city.

The flight I booked through someone else

For the flight from Santiago to Rio, the airlines' own websites were my main problem. Again I could not complete all the data they asked for. I ended up booking through Booking.

What the companies' dashboards saw

From the inside, none of this looks like a story. The bus companies saw sessions that searched and left. The resellers saw a form abandoned at the data step. The airline saw an abandoned checkout and, somewhere else in its reports, a sale through an online travel agency. Nobody saw a foreign customer who wanted to buy and could not.

It reminded me of a checkout I worked on at JD Sports Group, where the numbers looked wrong because one page in the funnel was never tracked. Here the hole was bigger: part of the journey happened on sites the companies did not control, and part of it happened at a ticket window.

What I would measure

If I were the analyst at one of these companies, I would start with four things.

1. Form errors by field, split by the visitor's country. A required field that foreigners cannot fill in shows up as one field with a much higher error rate for one group of visitors.
2. The stability of inventory across searches and channels. The same route and date, searched twice within a few minutes on the company's own site or on a marketplace, should return the same buses. When a departure disappears from one channel and stays on another, that is an inventory problem, and customers read it as unreliability.
3. Demand that leaks to other channels. Compare abandoned checkouts from a market with the bookings from that market that arrive through intermediaries or at the ticket office. If one goes up when the other goes up, the direct channel is losing sales it could keep.
4. One short question on exit: what stopped you? At JD a short survey on the checkout gave us reasons that the funnel numbers alone could not.

A question to finish

When a customer gives up on your checkout and buys somewhere else, does any report connect the two events, or do they show up as one lost session and one unrelated sale?