Travel properties, which include online travel agents, destination information sites, and transportation and accommodation sites, now penetrate 44 percent of the European Internet audience, a five percentage point increase, according to comScore’s study for April 2011.

Published: 02 Jun 2011

Travel properties, which include online travel agents, destination information sites, and transportation and accommodation sites, now penetrate 44 percent of the European Internet audience, a five percentage point increase, according to comScore’s study for April 2011.

As per the report, the number of European visitors to the travel category grew 11 percent in the past year.

Findings:

• The UK continues to lead European markets in travel category penetration at 66.5 percent, up eight percentage points from a year ago.
• Ireland and Spain show similarly high penetration rates, with 58.7 percent reach and 57.3 percent reach, respectively.
• Although Russia currently has the lowest penetration rate for travel properties among the 18 markets at 27.8 percent, it showed the highest growth in unique visitors over the past year with a 41 percent increase.

Leading sites

Expedia Inc., which includes TripAdvisor Sites, Expedia Sites, and Hotels.com Sites, attracted the most unique visitors in April 2011 with 21.7 million.

Priceline.com Inc. followed with 16.4 million unique visitors, up 10 percent versus last year – the highest growth rate among the top Travel properties in Europe. Priceline’s sizeable audience was fueled in large part by hotel reservation site Booking.com, which attracted 15.8 million visitors.

Groupe SNCF (French National Railway Corporation) was the third most heavily visited property in April with 9.3 million visitors.

Total size

In all, 365.3 million unique visitors went online in April 2011 for an average of 24.2 hours per person in Europe.

Among the 18 markets, the Netherlands showed the highest average engagement at 31.3 hours per person, 30 percent higher than the collective European average.

Among the top sites, Google Sites ranked as the top European web property in April, attracting 329.8 million unique visitors and reaching 90.3 percent of the total European Internet audience.

Microsoft Sites ranked second with 269.3 million visitors (73.7 percent reach), followed by Facebook.com in third place with 236.9 million visitors (64.9 percent reach).