Hitwise US Travel Report for January 2010 has indicated that 38.81 percent of all visits to the online travel industry went to the top 10 websites for the month of January, 2010.

Published: 11 Feb 2010

Hitwise US Travel Report for January 2010 has indicated that 38.81 percent of all visits to the online travel industry went to the top 10 websites for the month of January, 2010.

The traffic distribution analysis also shared that almost 48 percent of the visits went to the top 20 websites and 69 percent went to the top 100 websites.

The average visit duration for visits to the online travel industry was 7 minutes, 41 seconds for the month of January, 2010. This is a minimal increase from last month’s average visit duration of 7 minutes, 18 seconds.

The top five travel website based on visits were:

Google maps (maps.google.com, 14.67 percent market share) followed by MapQuest (www.mapquest.com, 8.54 percent), Expedia (www.expedia.com, 3.47 percent), Southwest Airlines (www.southwest.com, 2.18 percent), and Travelocity (www.travelocity.com, 2 percent).

Category contribution percentage was 1.59 percent. The Hitwise data featured is based on US market share of visits, which is the percentage of online traffic to the domain or category, from the Hitwise sample of 10 million US Internet users.

Travel industry search terms

The most popular search terms for the four weeks ending January 30, that resulted in traffic to websites were as follows:

mapquest - 3.13 percent, mapquest driving directions - 1.60 percent, google maps - 1.17 percent, maps - 0.88 percent, southwest airlines - 0.87 percent, google earth - 0.69 percent, map quest - 0.58 percent, cheap flights - 0.50 percent, expedia - 0.48 percent, Travelocity - 0.47 percent.

The travel online industry received an average of 38.61 percent of its upstream traffic from search engines over the past six months. The top referring search engines for the month of January, 2010 were Google, Yahoo! Search and Bing.

The industry received 8.87 percent more upstream traffic from search engines than the Internet average of 29.73 percent. The industry sent 1.63 percent less downstream traffic to search engines than the Internet average of 10.18 percent.

The average percentage of upstream search engine traffic for the travel industry was 38.61 percent for the six months ending January, 2010. For the same period, the average percentage of downstream search engine traffic was 8.55 percent.