02 March 2009

TripAdvisor adds flight and price comparisons

TripAdvisor has started providing flight and price comparisons on its website.

The online travel community aims to drive additional revenue through advertising revenue on the pages and referral fees for bookings.

The new initiative also creates additional competition within the travel metasearch sector against websites like Kayak and Booking Buddy, according to Hitwise UK.

"This latest offering provides TripAdvisor with an opportunity to TripAdvisor already attracts a substantial audience and ranked 11th in terms of market share of visits among the travel category for the week ending Feb 21, 2009 out of over 8,000 websites," Hitwise said.

"Within the destinations and accommodations sub-category, TripAdvisor ranked 1st and captured 4.37% of the market share of visits.

"A quick look at TripAdvisor’s downstream traffic shows that the volume of visitors going to the metasearch websites immediately following a visit has been growing over the past year.

"Many of the visitors to TripAdvisor are researching travel plans, so combined with the fact that many are already visiting metasearch websites, flight searches are a natural extension of services to the audience."

by Phil Davies