The collapse yesterday of Globespan, parent company of Scottish airline FlyGlobespan, saw customers and those in-resort heading to their computers in dramatic numbers.
Figures from Experian Hitwise UK paint a sad picture of travellers desperate to find out how they will either get home (around 4,500 are said to be stranded overseas) or those hoping to fly with the airline in the coming weeks and months.
As news emerged of the company’s dark and unfortunate route into financial administration, visitor numbers to its website soared by 511% on the previous day.
In line with what happened earlier this week when British Airways found itself at the wrong end of a major industrial dispute, other airlines and travel provider websites benefited from the collapse as customers attempted to figure out what to do next.
EasyJet, Ryanair and OnTheBeach were the top three sites visited immediately after seeing the holding page Globespan created to inform customers of its demise.
Meanwhile, metasearch site Skyscanner has reported a 283% surge in searches on routes that were once operated by FlyGlobespan aircraft.
NB: Passengers and customers affected by the collapse of FlyGlobespan are advised to visit the ATOL (CAA) website to learn more about their bookings, repatriation and financial protection.
NB: Aircraft image by Martin J Galloway.
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Even if the news are bad, it is good to see that travelers start having the good reflex when they are looking for flights: main low-cost companies of course, but also a few travel search engines.
Slowly people are getting aware of what a metasearch engine is and start using them.
However I am surprised that Liligo did not appear among the visited metasearch sites. Isn’t it more and more used in UK?
Jeremy: No, Liligo is way down the pecking order amongst the UK metasearch sites.
Always fun to see who advertises on Google on the back of such failures. Step forward Travel Republic, Thomson and a hotel in the Cotswolds. Should the southwest be preparing for an invasion of Scottish holidaymakers?
http://www.google.co.uk/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=1R2ADFA_enGB358&q=flyglobespan&meta=lr%3D&aq=f&oq=
Lee: Add TravelCounsellors and Virgin Holidays to the list.
Interesting to note that some are using the /globspan at the end of PPC URLs – something normally frowned upon and often likely to trigger legalities due to trademark protection.
Not much chance of that happening now.
I think the quick response from CAA certainly was positive. When Freedom Direct went under they were hundreds of comments left on my blog, where this time I could direct consumers to the info on the CAA website. Travel Rants were the only site using PPC ads on Google to help consumers rather than take more money off them tho
Sorry, let me rephrase that last line of my comment. What I meant was that it wasn’t just airlines/metas that were using Google PPC ads, but I also used it to direct worried consumers to my post, while Google indexed it.
I noticed a huge spike in traffic when combining posting on Twitter with Google live search for the ‘flyglobespan’ brand name. With this you no longer need to worry about ranking high on the 1st page for trending topics.