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Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Hopkins - UK

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Q Hotels UK Growth Online & Hotels Update

June 13, 2007

A couple of weeks ago we published a three page update on the hotels category online (if you'd like a copy post a comment with your email address and we'll send it to you). One of the findings was that www.qhotels.co.uk was one of the fastest growing hotels websites based on UK visits. The site's visits were up 3 fold year on year in April, seemingly a result of a 57% increase in upstream visits from search engines.

Today, I'll be presenting an online seminar on the three page update and in preparartion, I did a bit more digging on Q Hotels. (Hitwise clients will be able to see a recording of the online seminar in Hitwise University later this week. I'll update this post with a link to the recording).

For the update, we created a custom category of the 20 most visited Hotels websites in April. Travelodge ranked #1 and Q Hotels ranked #20. Among those 20 websites, Q Hotels saw the fastest increase in market share of UK visits (up 3-fold year on year). The following chart shows visits to Q Hotels website on the left axis and downstream vistis from search engines on the right axis. Thge chart visually illustrates the importance of search engine traffic to the site's growth.
Q Hotels Visits.png

Often when we see such rapid site growth, we also see an aggressive paid search marketing campaign. However, as you can see from the following Website Search Terms report for Q Hotels, only 4% of the site's search traffic came from paid listings in the four weeks to 9th June 2007.
Q Hotels Search Terms.png

The growth appears to be driven by acquisitions. Q Hotels has been increasing its stable of properties quite rapidly. A report from 2006 cited 3 acquisitions to take the brand to 9 properties with a goal of reaching 14 to 16 hotels in 2007. The Q Hotels website lists 22 properties, indicating that the pace of acqusitions is even faster than planned. Share of UK Internet searches for "q hotels" has seen a corresponding increase, from a base of zero a year ago to 0.006% of all UK internet searches last week and 0.12% of searches sending visits to Hotels websites.

Other interesting insights from the three page report include:
- Share of UK visits to Hotels websites are decreasing, but visits to Travelodge continue to grow. Travelodge accounted for one-quarter of visits to Hotels websites in April and has seen its market share of UK Internet visits increase 3% year on year.
- 53% of UK visits to Hotels websites came from a search engine in April with 79% of that from Google (google.co.uk and google.com combined) - up 14% year on year. Yahoo! Search was the #2 search engine, and visits from Yahoo! Search to Hotels was up 28% year on year in April.
- Hotels websites rely heavily on branded search terms for visits. The top non-branded search term sending visits to Hotels websites was "hotels" ranking #50 among search terms sending visits to Hotels websites. Generic searches tend to send visits to the agencies who compete heavily in the organic and paid results.

Posted by Heather Hopkins at 08:00 AM | (8) | (0)
In Categories Travel