In recent weeks, we have been watching visits to the retail and travel categories as consumer spending continues to decline. There have been several factors impacting traffic – the elections, the economy, and also the calendar, with Thanksgiving falling later in the season this year. Typically Thanksgiving is a major time for travel, but in the weeks leading up to the holidays, traffic to Airline websites have been at their lowest level in three years, with only a slight rebound last week following the election. Overall, last week traffic to a custom category of 47 Airlines websites was down 11% as compared to the same week last year.

To further understand this trend, we created two additional custom categories of websites – major and discount carriers. So far, the discount carriers have experienced a larger decline in visits, 14%, as compared to traffic to major carriers, which declined 7% last week from the previous year. One reason behind this could be a greater slowdown in spending among leisure travelers, while business travel helps boost the traffic for the major airlines. For example, Southwest is a discount airline that represents almost half of the visits to the discount airline category and tends to service both the business traveler and the leisure traveler. The market share of visits to Southwest.com were up 7% last week as compared to the previous year while others in the discount airlines category experienced dips in traffic.
My inbox has been filled with airfare sales for the past week, so we may see some of the traffic rebound as potential travelers are tempted by deals. Searches for ‘cheap flights’ increased 28% for the week ending Nov. 8, 2008, suggesting that there is demand for the right (or cheapest) price.