Hitwise Flight Search Data
A lot has been written in early January about some headline grabbing figures from hitwise that said that searches for flights were 42% down in the week after Crimbo compared with the year before.
Original article by Robin Goad at hitwise
Disussion at Travolution and TravelRants
My thoughts on the matter:
People don’t need to search as much as they used to :
- XL are gone, and the big four travel multiples and down to two and are reducing capacity.
- Airlines better than ever at sending relevant emails to their customers at the right time.
- Meta search engines have been bookmarked by customers.
- People are leraning that cheapest way to get flights is direct to airline. Sorry agencies.
So there is a lot less reason to look for flights via a web search than last year, doesn’t mean that bookings will be lower though. People will book they just need a bit more time :
- The period compared and the ways the day fell gave people less back to work time than than the previous year.
- Other concerns compared to last year have surfaced, job security etc so people have other things on their mind at the moment.
The turn of year booking period is all about people booking the peak period travel, school summer holidays. To do that they need to get back to work and agree the dates with their boss.
This got me thinking about searches for flights and holidays so I did a spot of research:
I have taken the below graph from a google tool called Google Trends. The blue line is for “holiday” and the red line for “flight“. One observation I have from this graph is that it seems the pre Christmas period is getting worse and worse each year. Maybe this is a case of consumers being educated to wait until the turn of the year for the big discounts to be turned on. Time will tell how big the spike in Jan is. Hitwise have promised to provide info at the end of the month.
Source for graph :
http://www.google.co.uk/trends?q=holiday%2C+flight&ctab;=0&geo;=GB&geor;=all&date;=all&sort;=0
Another interesting one is looking at searches for ATOL…. Very low until XL went belly up :
http://www.google.co.uk/trends?q=atol+&ctab;=0&geo;=GB&geor;=all&date;=2008&sort;=0
Possibly Related posts ? :
I commented at the last Travolution question time (London) that as a result of less suppliers, there would be less need for search.
The consensus was I was talking rubbish. Anyway, now there are two of us!