Top 10 Travel Destinations and Accommodation on the Internet
Shout out to Andrew Chen for reading the Internet so that I don’t have to. Specifically he found a great study published by Hitwise. They keep track of the traffic to about a million web sites daily and ranked those in the travel destination and accommodation content area based on the total amount of US traffic. The end result is a list of the top 10 web sites in this area. Of the 10, 7 are for hotel chains. The remainder are TripAdvisor, the U.S. National Park Service and Six Flags. Some people might make a good argument that TripAdvisor is actually heavily used as a way to get info on accommodations.
The main point is that these sites are used primarily by travelers before they travel. Once they get to their destinations, there is usually little reason to look for hotels if they have already reserved one. These results suggest that travelers are not making as much use of the Internet after they arrive at their destination as you might expect. You would expect that travelers would make more use of the Internet in unfamiliar surroundings such as when they travel.
Travelers are not using the Internet as much after they arrive because they are not familiar with which local web sites can give them the best local info. Instead, they still rely on conciercers and local travel desk staff for recommendations and local information.
As the mobile web becomes easier to use and more local information gets cataloged on the web by latitude and longitude, travelers will begin to look to the mobile web for immediate local info.
Geogad is to its part to make the mobile web richer for travelers every day.
Tags: local information, mobile web, travel, web traffic