British Airways strike – consumer panic sends web traffic soaring, rivals benefit

Confirmation yesterday that cabin crew with British Airways will strike over the Christmas and New Year was met with a mixture of outrage and panic by passengers planning trips during the festive period.

BA, which is now threatening to take legal action against the union involved, says up to one million customers will face cancelled flights or require hastily re-arranged plans as a result of the 12-day action beginning 22 December.

It appears that a high number of those affected also hit the airline’s website yesterday.

Data from Experian Hitwise UK reveals that BA.com saw a 64% increase in traffic on the previous day after the result of the strike ballot by the Unite union was announced yesterday.

The surge of traffic passed of without incident – a noteworthy event given that on Friday last week the airline’s website hit the skids for six-hours due to a still unexplained technical hitch.

Meanwhile additional data shows where traffic on BA.com went to immediately after visiting the beleaguered airline’s site.

Unsurprisingly the majority of the downstream clicks went to other travel websites, as customers scrambled around for new arrangements.

EasyJet, Virgin Atlantic and BMI benefited the most amongst the airlines, while Expedia and Cheapflights were highly placed other travel firms.

Finally, paid search on Google, for example, benefited from new advertising related to the strike, with a mixture of travel companies and a number of opportunistic and mischief-making others wading in.