“Cheap flights” most popular online travel search

Sunday, 14 Apr, 2005 0

The online travel sector has seen a 20% year-on-year growth in market share of website visits, according to latest data from Hitwise.

Calculations by the online competitive intelligence service show that the increase in share came despite a decline in the proportion of visits to travel websites last month.

Hitwise statistics show travel websites receiving 4.27% of all online visits in March – a drop from a peak of almost 5% in December, 2004.

“Cheap flights”, “flights” and “holidays” were the most popular generic travel searches and the price comparison website www.cheapflights.co.uk received more than a third of all searches on the term “cheap flights”.

Meanwhile, easyJet, Ryanair and Expedia were the most searched for brands driving traffic to the online travel sector, according to Hitwise.

Opodo – number three a year ago – dropped out of the top 10 travel agency websites in March. The top 10 rankings were: Expedia with a 9.34% market share, lastminute.com (7.59%), Teletext Holidays (4.33%), Thomson Holidays (4.18%), First Choice (2.80%), Airline Network (2.30%), Thomas Cook (2.23%), ebookers (2.23%), cheapflights (2.15%) and MyTravel (2.12%).

The top 10 aviation websites in March were: easyJet (20.33%), Ryanair (14.43%), British Airways (11.13%), bmibaby (7.79%), Flybe (5.16%), Thomson Flights (3.81%), Thomsonfly (3.63%), Bmi (3.61%), Jet2 (3.58%) and Monarch (3.17%).

Iterations of the search term “flights” show the destinations that are currently most popular are “Tenerife”, “Australia” and “Cyprus”, while two-word searches are most popular in the travel sector

Meanwhile, Hitwise said travel websites received 36.74% of traffic from search engines – 5.73% more than the industry average.

Travel websites sent 54.41% of traffic to other travel sites – illustrating the “fierce competitiveness” of the sector, Hitwise added.

Report by Phil Davies

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Phil Davies

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