It’s been quite a year – but not for airline web traffic

airline traffic google trendsWe are officially celebrating the one year anniversary of the GFC – Global Financial Crisis meltdown.

I think by now much of the stories and speculation have been written.

So let’s look at some website traffic stats and see if there is anything we can deduce from them.

I was prompted to this by blog entries from two sources – Shearwater (by Martin Collings, an Amadeus guy who has the awesome title of head of airline robotics – international, based in Madrid Spain with Amadeus IT Group) and a post by This Is Money.

So I went and dived into travel traffic over the last 12 months from Google Trends for several major travel sites.

I deliberately was arbitrary in my selection of traffic. BA.com is not really that interesting except on its own. So however I left it in as a reference point. The sites I chose were:

google trends - british airways

 

 

 

 

 

google trends - expedia

 

google trends - ryanair

 

google trends - easyjet

 

 

 

 

 

google trends - southwest

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I realize this is not fully scientific but I wanted to get a good sense of what was going on.

The interesting things are somewhat self evident.

There is a general downward trend that analysts were picking up last year.

This trend seems to be reasonably consistent. We see spikes occurring as we can expect.

But the general traffic tells me that there is a certain tiredness with current websites. This should be worrying to all.

Food for thought – I would be interested to see if people agree with me or see that social networks are rising in importance as a result. The decline of the web brand?

No related posts.

Timothy O'Neil-Dunne About Timothy O'Neil-Dunne

Timothy O'Neil-Dunne is managing partner at travel consultancy firm, T2Impact. He serves as the lead for the airline, aviation and airport practice.

Timothy was a founding management team member of the Expedia team where he headed the ground transportation and international portfolios, before founding T2Impact in 1998.

He has worked in aviation and travel distribution for more than 30 years, including time with Worldspan as head of technology where he managed international technology services from product to infrastructure.

He is also CTO and deputy CEO of Lute Technologies, a permanent advisor to the World Economic Forum and writes on the T2Impact Blog.

Comments

  1. Joe Buhler says:

    So we’re getting Professor Sabena on Tnooz! Glad to read you here and see that you finally start using Twitter as well. I’m sure this will bring you a following with fewer Luddites then your blog followers, based on the latest poll you have there -;

  2. Martin says:

    Tim, thanks for the plug. Just yesterday I saw a new report from PhoCusWright called “Online Traffic and Conversion Report” but the relevant pages are still sitting on my desk waiting to be read. I suspect part of the drop in airline visitors you mention may be improved conversation rates leading to less shopping around, but it is only a guess at this stage. Also interesting to note on the Google stats that most non airline websites (including the major media brands) are also showing declining numbers from the start of 2009.

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