The industry knows (and many get irritated by the fact) that Booking.com is the online travel giant of the age.
The Priceline Group-owned business pretty much conquered Europe during the late-2000s and is now gradually asserting its influence in North America and Asia.
Some hoteliers have a love-hate relationship with Booking.com - knowing that they are perhaps too subservient to its (tight?) grip on their distribution, but respectful that without it many would simply not fill their properties with guests.
The company rarely shares much data about traffic patterns or how its famed digital marketing strategy actually works - so it is left to third-party tools to try and understand what is going on behind the scenes that will give it such a prominent role in the hotel sector.
SimilarWeb recently released a report on Booking.com following a year's worth of number crunching.
It estimates that the Booking.com domain captured more than four billion visitors between June 2015 and May 2016.
Whilst the company's traffic is as cyclical as most other travel brands, Booking.com's peak months are in the northern hemisphere's summer period, illustrating that it does not follow traditional patterns of high volumes of bookings in the first few months of a new year (although there is a spike in March).
So how does Booking.com generate such eye-watering levels of traffic?
SimilarWeb analysed traffic sources over the same time frame, measuring organic search, keyword buying, display ads and others.
What is perhaps most notable for Booking.com and the industry as a whole is that, despite being well-known (and admitting) that it spends hundreds of million of dollars every year on digital marketing (the Priceline Group as a whole splashed out $2.8 billion during 2015), direct traffic is the leading source of visitors to the site.
This can only mean that its brand awareness is now so huge (and CRM strategy with former guests so effective) that it has created a position that is almost as omnipresent in the minds of travellers as it has with the industry.
NB:Booking.com tablet device image via BigStock.