It's been quite a year - but not for airline web traffic

We 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:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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?