SimilarWeb has found that the most-expensive desktop keyword in travel is "restaurants near me", averaging $3.78 per click.
"Cheap hotels" comes next, averaging $3.35 per click.
Not surprisingly, it is the big brands who are dominating. For "restaurants near me" TripAdvisor brands are hoovering up some 40% of the traffic, with businesses such as Yelp and Zomato some considerable distance away and securing only 5.2% and 3.1% respectively.
Restaurants are an important part of TripAdvisor's product line-up as it continues to build on its reviews heritage and morph into a bookings platform. It was more than a year ago that its CEO Steve Kaufer told analysts that restaurant bookings are "a frequent use case [and] leverage our existing traffic. It’s something we already know how to do. And when you get to scale, it works profit-wise.”
Priceline's $2.6 billion purchase of OpenTable in 2014 was an early sign that travel firms were starting to think about the total trip rather than just the flight and hotel.
In contrast, Expedia's presence in the eating out sector is via its "things to do" channel.
SimilarWeb's analysis identified the top ten searches in travel as follows: "flight tracker", "flights", "hotel", "car rental", "airline tickets", "restaurants near me", "cheap hotels", "plane tickets" "cheap tickets" and "train tickets".
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