Top 10 Travel Web Sites

In the month of November (2008), according to Hitwise data, 39.36% of all web traffic related to the “travel” industry went to the following top 10 web sites:

1. Mapquest
2. Google Maps
3. Yahoo! Maps
4. Southwest Airlines
5. Expedia
6. Travelocity
7. Orbitz
8. Priceline
9. Yahoo! Travel
10. American Airlines

In my humble opinion, the top three shouldn’t be considered “vacation” type travel web sites. Sure, once I know my vacation destination I’ll make use of directional travel sites, and on occasion, I’ll even use those sites for planning a vacation. However, they are in the top three for directional purposes, and most likely for short-range trips.

Therefore, if my “assumption” that the top three are not really vacation/long-range travel planning web sites, Southwest Airlines was the real number one travel site in the November. That is for a good reason, Southwest is the only airline that “consistently” offers travel bargains. So, hats off to Southwest Airlines!

So far, the travel industry seems to be holding on to hope that 2009 won’t be as bad as we all think. Travel executives are trying to keep “pricing integrity” intact (for which read, “Don’t offer rock-bottom rates just to fill an empty seat or room”) until they see what impact the bailouts have on the economy.

Some have suggested that 2008 was the year of the “Stay-cation” and if things don’t pick up, 2009 will be the year of the “Nay-cation”.