TripAdvisor claims ‘staggering’ influence
TripAdvisor has released the findings of a study which it claims shows that its review site reached 62% of all UK travellers who researched and ultimately booked travel online last year.
The Path to Purchase study was carried out by comScore from April-September 2017 across 12 key global markets on more than 325 transactional sites.
The UK figure was slightly higher than the global average of 60%.
"The results of the Path to Purchase study show that on average travellers take a month or more to research their trip, and that during this time, TripAdvisor’s influence over consumers’ hotel and flight booking decisions is staggering," said Martin Verdon-Roe, vice president of product and marketing, hotels at TripAdvisor.
"This gives savvy travel businesses a crucial window of opportunity to engage with these travellers on TripAdvisor at a highly influential stage, especially through our display, metasearch and Business Advantage products."
The study found TripAdvisor is the number one most-visited site and app, followed by Booking.com, Trivago, Hotels.com and Expedia.
The study also shows TripAdvisor’s influence over consumers’ travel purchasing decisions, regardless of whether consumers ultimately end up booking on a hotel, online travel agent (OTA) or airline website.
The study also found 71% of all first travel searches in the UK in 2017 were generic with no brand or destination mentioned.
Bev
Editor in chief Bev Fearis has been a travel journalist for 25 years. She started her career at Travel Weekly, where she became deputy news editor, before joining Business Traveller as deputy editor and launching the magazine’s website. She has also written travel features, news and expert comment for the Guardian, Observer, Times, Telegraph, Boundless and other consumer titles and was named one of the top 50 UK travel journalists by the Press Gazette.
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