Online air travel buyer habits revealed
More than half of online air travel shoppers begin their search with an online travel agency, but evenly split their bookings between the online agencies and direct with the airlines, according to Nielsen/NetRatings in its Quarterly Travel Benchmarking Survey.
54 percent of travel shoppers begin their research at an online travel agency, compared to 37 percent that start with airlines, and 9 percent with a travel meta-search provider.
“The wide selection of travel suppliers drive the majority of travel shoppers to begin their research with agencies and meta-search providers before directly visiting a supplier,” Heather Dougherty, senior Internet analyst for Nielsen/NetRatings, said in statement. “At that point, suppliers are in a strong position to capture a potential sale as consumers visit their sites to confirm pricing and frequent flyer benefits before making the final purchase.
“Additionally, the growth of travel meta-search players, such as Kayak and SideStep, provide suppliers with sales opportunities through side-by-side price comparisons with agencies.”
With nearly half of all airline ticket sales and reservations conducted online during the last six months, airlines had a stronger record for converting shoppers to buyers, while agencies fared better in drawing visitors to the site for comparison shopping, destination searches and multi-trip bookings, reported Internet Week.
Southwest Airlines, American Airlines and Delta ranked as the three most visited airline websites during April 2005. Southwest led with 8.1 million unique Web surfers, compared to 5.7 million and 4.9 million that visited American and Delta, respectively, the research firm said. Southwest converted the most “lookers into bookers” with a 14 percent visitor conversion rate, followed by Delta and American with 10 and 9 percent.
Online travel agencies attracted up to twice the number of visitors as airlines during April 2005. Expedia drew 16.3 million unique visitors to its site, with Travelocity and Orbitz ranking as the second and third most popular online travel agency with nearly 12 million each, reported Nielsen/NetRatings. Expedia, Orbitz and Travelocity secured conversion rates of nearly 5 percent, 4 percent and 3 percent, respectively.
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