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While the future and scale of Tripadvisor’s long-term profitability and market positioning remain a talking point in the investment community, there is no question of its effect on the travel industry as a whole. Tripadvisor’s share of traffic in the travel industry has grown 26% in the last three years.
As of February 2018, Tripadvisor drives 0.95% of all traffic to the travel industry as a whole. That’s up 20% from 0.79% of traffic during the same time period last year.
Tripadvisor.com remains the #1 resource for travel planning — below you see it is the top website (that is not a search engine or email service) driving traffic to the travel industry:
Tripadvisor also receives 0.83% of traffic after consumers visit any travel site. TripAdvisor ranks high in upstream and downstream - meaning it’s visited both before and after travel sites, suggesting that Tripadvisor is deeply woven into the travel research & booking process as a source for referral and evaluation.
Tripadvisor drives strong offsite hotel bookings
Tripadvisor refers about 2% of all visitors the top ten hotel websites, with hotels like IHG receiving as much as 3%.
Unsurprisingly, Tripadvisor drives revenue most deeply in its core vertical: hotels. Below, you see how this plays out within two major OTA websites, Expedia and Priceline. Tripadvisor drives a sizeable amount of hotel bookings specifically in both sites, and relatively less conversions for flights or cars.
Tripadvisor supports flight bookings for United, Southwest and CheapOair
Tripadvisor drives less traffic to the airline industry than hotels — only about about 0.33% of traffic to the Airline industry comes from Tripadvisor.com.
It also appears that, in general, Tripadvisor feeds more flight bookings via OTAs than it does on airline sites directly.
Within airlines, United and Southwest get more flight bookings from Tripadvisor than American or Delta do. Meanwhile OTAs like CheapOair and Expedia pull the most flight bookings from Tripadvisor’s referring traffic .
Tripadvisor is a big part of the booking process for most travelers — but where else do travelers go before they book? What keywords do they search, and what sites do they compare prices on? Learn how to track your customer’s journey in our Path to Booking Report here.
Source: Upstream and downstream activity data pulled from Hitwise platform during the month of February, 2018. Booking data based on visits to a booking confirmation page for flights, hotels or car rentals.
This article by Hitwise appears as part of the tnooz sponsored content initiative.