Hitwise releases its UK Quarterly Travel Research Note
The travel industry has enjoyed explosive growth over the past few years and is one of the top e-commerce industries. A handful of players have dominated the industry over the past year, but things appear to be set to change as smaller players snap up market share.
Hitwise has just released the first edition of its UK Quarterly Travel Research Note which provides insights into the trends affecting the sector, the practices of the leading players, and analysis of Sabre's proposed acquisition of Lastminute.com.
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Key Findings of the report are:
Websites for commercial airlines have enjoyed explosive growth, with 24% increase in market share of visits in April 2005, compared with April 2004.
easyJet, RyanAir.com, and British Airways have been the top three airlines for the past twelve months based on market share of visits. Over that same period, smaller players have enjoyed significant growth in share of visits, narrowing the gap to the leaders.
Travel Agencies experience the highest level of comparison shopping among the leading e-commerce sectors, with one quarter of visits to travel agency websites coming from another site in the same category.
Travel websites receive more visits from search engines than average for other sites on the internet, but receive fewer visits from e-mail services.
Travel websites attract a wealthy demographic, with wealthy families, empty nesters and young urban professionals most likely to visit travel websites. These groups are also most likely to book three or more holidays a year, based on an offline survey by Experian.
Expedia.co.uk maintained its hold on the #1 spot among online travel agencies in April in terms of market share of visits. The site also enjoys an above average session time and share of pages viewed. These factors combined indicate strong audience engagement among Expedia.co.uk's many visitors.
There is a strong link between the share of visits to travel agency websites and the number of search terms sending visits to the sites.
travelmole report that Hitwise warn: "against complacency in successful search marketing despite travel websites receiving more than average visits from search engines than other sites on the internet.
Managers of travel websites need to keep abreast of the search terms sending visits to their site and those of their competitors, the report says. As more people visit your site, the variety of search terms used to reach your site will also increase."
Travel Agencies
Whilst Travelocity is the term which sends the largest volume of visits to Travel Agencies in the US, this is not the case in the UK. In contrast, it is the 23rd most popular search term sending visits to Travel Agencies in the UK.
For volume of searches, "lastminute" is a much stronger brand in the UK but "expedia" has a significant lead on this measure and is the 2nd most popular search term.
Top search terms sending traffic to Travel Agency sites in the UK, for the 4-week period ending 7/5/2005:
Search Term Share (%)
1. cheap flights 1.88
2. expedia 1.64
3. holidays 1.36
4. cheap holidays 1.17
5. thomas cook 1.00
6. flights 0.91
7. first choice 0.67
8. thomson holidays 0.65
9. airtours 0.56
10. teletext holidays 0.55
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