Travel sites booking stats (USA) UK review Hitwise August

Normal is a relative thing : Orbitz (the airline owned website) saw a 17% drop in bookings for July, but described this as a return to more normal travel buying trends. However, Cheap Tickets saw an 8% increase, Travelocity reported a 15% increase, and Expedia enjoyed a 20% increase in July.

But who is winning the share of mind amongst UK Internet users? Simon Chamberlain noted: “With search engines driving more than a third of visits to the Travel sector, understanding the brands people are searching for is a great way to assess the relative strength of brands online. In those terms, “easyJet” continues to be front of mind for UK consumers, with “Ryanair” and “British Airways” just behind, showing the clear dominance of low cost carriers on the web.” Most searched for Travel brands The following report lists the most popular terms typed into a search engine over the last 12 weeks that resulted in traffic to websites classified by Hitwise within the 'Travel' industry. For example, the most popular search term was 'easyjet' representing 2.36% of all search terms that delivered users to websites classified by Hitwise in the 'Travel' industry.
search term market share %
easyjet 2.36
ryanair 1.82
cheap flights 1.67
british airways 1.24
flights 0.98
train times 0.84
holidays 0.84
expedia 0.73
cheap holidays 0.68
travel inn 0.62
travel lodge 0.57
hotels 0.55
easy jet 0.54
national express 0.53
ryan air 0.51

Hitwise:
Visits to travel-related websites represented 5% of all online visits - one in 20 - in July, compared with one in 25 in January.
The statistics compiled by leading online competitive intelligence service Hitwise demonstrate continued strong growth in traffic to travel sites.
This correlates with forecasts published in a Hitwise travel report earlier this year, which estimated the sector would reach 5% of all online visits by August 2004.
Between June and July 2004, visits to sites within the travel sector grew by 18%, compared with only 3.7% growth between May and June.
During the first two weeks of Euro 2004 (weeks ending July 12 and 19) visits to the travel sector actually declined, indicating that people decided to defer booking holidays until the end of Euro 2004, according to Hitwise.
The uplift in visits to the category which occurred in July suggests that consumers have taken advantage of late holiday deals, with traffic to the travel sector peaking in the week ending July 24 and reaching 5.09% of visits.
Hitwise data further reveals that average session duration on a travel website has also increased in the last two months, up from 5 minutes and 50 seconds in June to 6 minutes and 7 seconds in August.
Top 10 travel sites in the week ending August 21:
1) Multimap.com (4.09% market share)
2) lastminute.com (2.85%)
3) easyJet (2.49%)
4) Expedia.co.uk (2.29%)
5) National Rail (2.08%)
6) Automobile Association (1.86%)
7) Ryanair.com (1.62%)
8) Streetmap.co.uk (1.49%)
9) British Airways (1.41%)
10) MyTravel UK (1.28%)