Posts Tagged ‘ Travel ’
We often hear about how search engines compare in market share of searches or relevance of search results but what about query content? Analysis of query content for the travel category reveals that the search terms consumers use on the leading search engines (Google.com, Bing.com and Search.Yahoo.com) vary greatly. Take for example the following Hitwise [...][ READ MORE ]
It seems we Canadians are cheapskates when it comes to travel. The qualifier “cheap” is a popular one to include in searches in all of the markets we monitor. In Canada, there were 1,746 different search terms that included the word “cheap” in the twelve weeks to June 27, 2009. Looking at that list of [...][ READ MORE ]
Orbitz and Travelocity have announced that they will follow Expedia in eliminating fees for booking flights over the Internet. A few years ago we noticed that Travel Agencies see one of the highest levels of comparison shopping, measured by clickstream traffic. Looking at upstream visits to Travel Agencies, we see that 30% come from other [...][ READ MORE ]
The current economic conditions has impacted the travel industry and according to PhoCusWright, revenues are projected to decline 3% to reach $93 billion for the online leisure/unmanaged business travel market in 2009 (the first decline since tracking began in 1998). While the economy is hitting the travel industry and forcing cutbacks in spending, there has [...][ READ MORE ]
Southwest Airlines launched a summer sale two weeks ago with one-way prices on domestic flights as low as $49. The site’s share of US Internet visits have since jumped 22%. An article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal describing some of the challenges the airline is facing mentioned that after logging a 12% increase in revenue [...][ READ MORE ]
Today TripAdvisor launched a new section on the website to provide users with the functionality to search for flights and compare prices. This latest offering provides TripAdvisor with an opportunity to drive additional revenue through advertising revenue on the pages and referral fees for booking. TripAdvisor already attracts a substantial audience and ranked 11th in [...][ READ MORE ]
A story from The Economist about ski resorts caught my eye (okay, I am a bit behind in my reading – the story was from the double issue in December). The article said that the economy has hit ski resorts in the Rockies hard as consumers look for options closer to home to avoid costly [...][ READ MORE ]
We on the Hitwise analyst team have been on the hunt for recession proof categories. Last week I thought I spotted another such category – Cruises. Visits to Cruises websites are up 7% year over year. However, further digging revealed that it isn’t the category as a whole that is up but rather interest in [...][ READ MORE ]
Last week, JetBlue held a week long auction on eBay to sell over 300 airline tickets and vacation packages. All of the travel needs to be completed by October 6th, so these auctions provided an opportunity for JetBlue to quickly sell off unsold seats and packages. Prices started between five and ten cents, which helped [...][ READ MORE ]
In this second of two posts on the Travel report we issued last week, I wanted to share some findings from analysis we did on paid and organic traffic. In our analysis we noticed a huge difference in the ratio of paid and organic search traffic going to the various Travel sub-categories and to websites [...][ READ MORE ]
