Deals publisher Travelzoo is understandably showing off some data this week that illustrates its position at the top of a chart of travel firms who receive traffic from user emails.
The company's UK division heads a list of notable travel firms including EasyJet, Ryanair and Travelodge that perform strongly with downstream traffic from email bulletins.
The margin in January 2010 between the top three sites is tiny - 0.01% separating Travelzoo, EasyJet and Google Maps - but the publishing of the popular Top 20 weekly newsletter is keen to put its efforts into context against some of its larger rivals in the online travel sector.
The Experian Hitwise figures put Travelzoo's share at three times as high as that of Expedia and twice as much as British Airways.
However, Travelzoo has conceded that positions at the higher reaches of the chart could change if the figures were more inclusive of the wider email marketing sector.
The current data only supports downstream traffic to travel websites from free email providers such as Hotmail and GMail, understandably missing out on capturing traffic from any client-based service such as Microsoft Outlook and Entourage.
Travelzoo says it believes the traffic share from wider sources would be similar but admits EasyJet's customer base of business travellers would probably use corporate or client-based email services for ticketing and therefore traffic is not included in the Hitwise data.
The highest trafficked sites by share of downstream visits from email (UK, January 2001):
- Travelzoo UK
- EasyJet
- Google Maps UK
- Ryanair
- Travelodge
- Google Maps
- National Rail Enquiries
- British Airways
- Thomson
- Lastminute.com
For its part, Travelzoo says:
"We understand the data doesn't include all Outlook or client hosted email boxes, but we would assume that share would be similar among those applications - we can't think of any reason why it would be different. We don't break down how the percentage of traffic received from client site vs. web based email boxes."