Travel

The Top Online Travel Booking Sites for January 2014

2014 will be an interesting year to watch from traffic perspective. While Priceline Group has a huge lead, Expedia and Tripadvisor family will continue to duke it out.

Rafat Ali

Editor s Note: Late last year we started a once-a-quarter feature on top trafficked sites in various sectors in travel, using monthly data from SimilarWeb . We have found SimilarWeb’s traffic stats to be a relatively good barometer of web activity and much more accurate than other traffic comparison sites at least as far as proportional comparison goes.

We re starting 2014 by looking at the top online booking sites in travel. Keep in mind this does not account for direct sites of travel brands (airlines/hotels) themselves, which we have done in separate lists previously. Also, our threshold is roughly 5 million visits per month, and does not count any app activity, hence sites like HotelsCombined, Hipmunk and others don t show up.

Some observations on the list below:

• Compared to our first look for October data last year. we re now grouping country sites of same brand together, to get a better sense of the scale.
• Booking.com is still the king in travel, by a large margin over Expedia and TripAdvisor.
• Adding up Booking.com s sister sites Priceline.com, Agoda, and Kayak, the Priceline family is the Sinaloa cartel of travel to use a timely phrase.
• TripAdvisor.com is still bigger than Expedia.com on a standalone basis, but Expedia s family of sites, including Hotels.com and Hotwire.com brings it neck and neck with the TripAdvisor family of sites.
• HotelUrbano.com, the Brazilian hotel booking site, continues to be among the top sites in travel, though we understand a lot of that is traffic it is buying from various sources.
• Orbitz and Travelocity are not among the top ten booking sites in travel anymore, and will likely to have tough road going ahead.
• Cheapoair.com is among the top ten, but we understand a lot of its traffic is marketing-spend dependent.
• Indian sites MakeMyTrip, Yatra, and Cleartrip continue to impress, and clearly show the long term potential of Indian sites.
• Airbnb is now among the top 15 travel booking sites on the planet, a huge feat for a company that created a whole new market.
• Homeaway.com and VRBO.com, part of the HomeAway family, are the largest alternative accommodation sites on the planet.
• Skyscanner s network is among the top 20, but still has a long way to go if it wants to get up to the next run of top ten.
• ThomasCook and Thomson.co.uk (part of TUI) are among the only traditional travel agencies showing up in the ranks both of them are European strong.
• The big omission is Trivago, which has lots of country sites, each with lower than 5 million threshold we re using for rankings. Hence their overall absence from this list.
• Any other insights based on this data below? Any other big names we re missing? Post in comments below.