Expedia topples lastminute in website rankings

Lastminute.com has lost considerable market share to Expedia since the end of December, according to Hitwise. Hitwise marketing manager Jannie Cahill told TravelMole: “The two vie for the top spot each week, but Lastminute has come out on top more often than Expedia in the past year. The latest rankings show Lastminute has lost considerable market share. It suggests that Expedia has been doing something to push more traffic to their site.” The shift in share of visits could be due to the current sale being heavily promoted by Expedia. Lastminute’s share of visits to UK agency websites had almost halved from 11.5% during the month of December down to 6.8% for the week ending 10 January. Expedia had an 11% share, up from 9.9% in December. The last time Expedia was top of the UK agency rankings was in November. First Choice has also faired well in the first few weeks of 2004, moving from 17th position to ninth in the table of the most visited UK agency websites. The operator got 2.56% share of the visits in the week ending 10 January. The figures will be good news to chief executive, Peter Long, who said recently said that his aim was to get 30% of First Choice bookings online. Hitwise also reports that overall traffic to UK travel agency websites has increased in January, bucking the trend of a general malaise in online retailing. According to Hitwise market share of visits to shopping websites decreased from 10.6% to 9% following the Christmas splurge period. By contrast travel websites got a 4.1% share of visits in the week ending 10 January, nearly doubling it’s 2.3% for the week ending 20 December. Compared with the same point last year, visits to travel sites have increased by 27% as demand for winter breaks grows. For more information about Hitwise statistics, please contact Jannie Cahill, Hitwise UK Ltd, Tel: +44 (0)20 7378 3619; E-mail: [email protected] Information supplied to TravelMole by Hitwise, the global leader in real-time competitive intelligence, providing businesses with unique and actionable business information to maximise ROI. Each day, Hitwise monitors how over 25 million global Internet users interact with over 450,000 online businesses across 160 categories. Hitwise measures the most popular websites, profiles the demographics of visitors to these sites, as well as analysing where traffic is coming from and going to.