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Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Dougherty - North America

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TripAdvisor launches flight searches

February 27, 2009

Today TripAdvisor launched a new section on the website to provide users with the functionality to search for flights and compare prices. This latest offering provides TripAdvisor with an opportunity to drive additional revenue through advertising revenue on the pages and referral fees for booking. TripAdvisor already attracts a substantial audience and ranked 11th in terms of market share of visits among the Travel category for the week ending Feb 21, 2009 out of over 8,000 websites. Within the Destinations and Accommodations sub-category, TripAdvisor ranked 1st and captured 4.37% of the market share of visits.

DestAccomWMS 2-21-09.png

This new endeavor from TripAdvisor also creates additional competition within the Travel Metasearch category against websites like Kayak and Booking Buddy. A quick look at TripAdvisor’s downstream traffic shows that the volume of visitors going to the metasearch websites immediately following a visit has been growing over the past year. Many of the visitors to TripAdvisor are researching travel plans, so combined with the fact that many are already visiting metasearch websites, flight searches are a natural extension of services to the audience.

Downstream Traffic to Metasearch.png