Cheapflights boosts travel website traffic
Search engines and travel industry portals are becoming of growing importance as access points to agency websites.
Latest clickstream data from online research firm Hitwise shows that the top four referring sites belong to search engines including Google UK, Google, Ask Jeeves UK and MSN.co.uk Search.
UK-based travel search engine Cheapflights.co.uk is rated as the fifth most popular referring site, providiing almost one per cent of traffic to travel agency websites.
This is described by Hitwise as a “significant proportion” given the dominance of search engines in providing traffic to the travel industry.
Hitwise industry data for the four weeks to December 10 shows that search engines referred 36% of “upstream” traffic to travel agencies’ websites.
The top no-frills airline site was EasyJet in seventh place, while Thomson Holidays came in at 11th place, ahead of lastminute.com and British Airways.
Hitwise also found that visits to travel industry websites grew by 27% in the 12 months from November 2003. Traffic to travel websites in November accounted for 3.4% of all UK online traffic.
Most searched-for destinations in the month to December 11 were: Tenerife, Majorca, Spain, Greece, Lanzarote, Disneyland Resort Paris, Cyprus, Gran Canaria, Fuerteventura and Turkey.
Report by Phil Davies
Phil Davies
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