Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

While this data on Flights searches is interesting, there is a major inaccuracy in the way it is being reported based on the physical time period being reviewed.

Looking back 1 year, no data is shown for the weeks in December leading up to this point. Had this been the case, we would have seen a very similar lull over the Christmas period with people on Holiday and not making as much use of their computers. With users then returning to work (this year on the 5th for many employers, and the 2nd in 2008), this number surges as people look to book their early bird flights, holidays and breaks for the year with the highest peak normally experienced in the first couple of weeks of January.

Since the festive season fell midweek this year, this has had two effects:-

- Many people didn’t go back to work until the 5th January, much later than in previous years
- Because of the leap year, any YoY comparisons are two days out in terms of date range

With the data in question, this is comparing 5 days of January with 3 days which could result in activity being 2-3 times lower per day. This secondary factor alone would account for as much as a 30% decrease in traffic before you even look at people’s online consumption YoY as a result of a reduction of people at work and the possibility of holidays being booked over this period.

These elements need to be considered before data is misinterpreted with the potential to cause widespread panic throughout the sector!

Posted by Matt Lovell | January 8, 2009 02:23 PM

Hi Matt - thanks for the comment. The same criticism has also be made by David Soskin of CheapFlights on Twitter http://twitter.com/davidsoskin/status/1104093326 and by Kevin May at Travolution http://www.travolution.co.uk/blog/2009/01/is-a-little-context-needed-on.php - and I can see the point that is being made.

Making year on year comparisons is always tricky at this time of year because important days (Christmas Day, Boxing Day, News Year’s Day, first day back in the office) always fall at different times. (What can’t we have a 364 day year? Life would be so much easier!)

However, here is the reason why we are pretty confident of this data. January is a busy time for the travel industry, but January effectively starts in late December online, as people flock to travel sites straight after Christmas. Therefore, despite how the days fall, we are already well into the increase in travel related web traffic. Flight searches have been increasing on a weekly basis for 2 weeks now (between 20/12/08 & 27/12/08 and 27/12/08 & 03/01/09), and comparing seasonal increases this year to last year they are quite similar.

For the key week we are discussing, the weekly increase this year between and 27/12/08 & 03/01/09 was 57.5%, whereas last year the increase between 29/12/07 & 05/01/08and 52.5%. In other words, the weekly change in search volume was very similar for both years, implying that the behavior was actually very similar.

Of course, I admit that we have been a bit of a victim of our approach here: we led with the total drop, when actually the interesting part of the story is the shift in destinations away from Europe/US to other, relatively cheaper locations.

I also promise to revisit the data next week and at the end of January to see how it plays out.

Robin

Posted by Robin Goad | January 8, 2009 03:05 PM

Thanks for this interesting analysis.

Any chance you could clarify if these stats are "just" based on Google, Yahoo, MSN etc and not including skyscanner, kayak, and all the increasing number of meta-search engines for flights (surely more established than a year ago).

Also, would it be possible to see more destinations ?.

As I wrote on the Nordic Travel Blog today,
http://nordictravel.co.uk/2009/01/nordic-countries-buck-trend.html

"not sure what Sweden has done wrong not to get on the list. Also why Iceland doesn't appear, they should have more searches what with the Icelandic Kroner crashing, making it cheaper for tourists to visit."

Thanks

Rob

Posted by Rob Barham | January 8, 2009 08:36 PM

Hi Rob - thanks for the comment and mentioning us on your blog.

The search data does indeed ‘only’ come from traditional search engines – Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Ask, etc. However, search engines are by far the biggest source of traffic for travel sites; last week they accounted for 44.2% of their visits. Even the vertical search engines are reliant traditional search engines for much of their traffic. The 2 biggest in the UK (neither Kayak nor Skyscanner are particularly strong in the UK). Travel Supermarket and CheapFlights received, respectively, 48.8% and 55.1% of their traffic from Google et al last week.

Of course, one important thing to bear in mind is that the proportion of traffic that sites get from branded search is increasing. Therefore it could be argued that the vertical search engines (as well the airlines and travel agents themselves) are getting traffic via branded search and then people are doing the ‘flights to’ search on their site.

This may have a small impact on our data, but on the other hand the other big trend in search is that the long tail is getting more sophisticated – e.g. less searches for ‘flights to spain’, more for things like ‘east holiday flights to barcelona’. Crucially our search data includes not just the top level ‘flights to country’ searches, but is based on portfolio of searches for each destination – e.g. the Flights to Spain portfolio includes a number of searches for flights to specific cities, plus different phrasing such as ‘cheap flights’, ‘holiday flights’ etc. I think the point that I made about searches for Turkish flights bears this out.

Regarding your Nordic question – I’m not suite sure what Sweden has done. Maybe the pound has done less well against the Swedish than Danish and Norwegian Kronas? I’ve included the next 20 destination, ranked in descending order like the top 10 above. Iceland was bubbling under at number 11 – so less of a fall than the average, but not as much as expected.

We’ve actually be watching searches for ‘flights to Iceland’ for while and noticed that it hasn’t really gone up as much as expected give the currency situation. We’ve though about this and come up with these two explanations: 1. there are no budget airlines flying from the UK to Iceland, so getting there is still relatively expensive (this is also true of Finland, I think, which may explain its poor showing too). 2. The crisis has happened during the winter, maybe Iceland will experience the benefit closer to the summer.

11 Iceland -20.5%
12 Turkey -24.6%
13 Dubai -27.1%
14 Thailand -32.2%
15 UK -32.7%
16 Australia -32.8%
17 South Africa -32.9%
18 Caribbean -34.6%
19 Ireland -36.4%
20 Abu Dhabi -40.4%
21 Austria -41.0%
22 Italy -41.2%
23 Hong Kong -41.3%
24 Sweden -41.6%
25 Portugal -41.7%
26 Spain -42.8%
27 New Zealand -42.9%
28 Germany -43.5%
29 Canada -43.5%
30 Egypt -44.3%

Regards, Robin

PS – more on branded search here: http://weblogs.hitwise.com/robin-goad/2007/12/long_tail_evolution.html

Posted by Robin Goad | January 9, 2009 11:06 AM

In order to settle people's concerns, would it be possible for you to provide us with the 'UK Internet Searches for Flights' data or compare day versus day (i.e. christmas eve last year versus christmas eve this year) to show how this looks? Just conscious that having spoken to a number of the sites that get traffic from these keywords, they aren't showing drops at all (if anything they're seeing increased traffic) so I wonder how misleading the title which is now appearing in every major paper truely is...

Posted by Matt Lovell | January 9, 2009 11:42 AM

Hi Matt,

Unfortunately we our search data is only available on a weekly rather than daily basis, hence the fact that we have had to compare two weeks that are not exactly identical. Here are WEEKLY changes in flight searches for the key weeks people are talking about:

This is what happened in 2008:

22/12/07 to 29/12/07: +42.4%
29/12/07 to 05/01/08: +52.5%
05/01/08 to 12/01/08: +21.1%
12/01/08 to 19/01/08: -8.2%
19/01/08 to 26/01/08: -6.6%

In other words, based on last year’s data we have one week of increases until we reach the peak, and then flight searches start to tail off towards the end of January.

Here is what has happened this year:

20/12/08 to 27/12/08: +20.1%
27/12/08 to 03/01/09: +57.4%

So far the pattern looks similar, especially last week. Interestingly the Christmas week increase was a lot less this year, which has obviously had an impact on the YoY figures. Of course, one theory may be that searches continue increasing further into January – i.e. they have more than one week of increases left in them. This is quite likely, particularly if people are waiting to get over their post Christmas spending hangovers before booking holidays.

I promise to update this data via the blog on a weekly basis, as the next couple of weeks will obviously prove vital. If we do see the January peak extend significantly later into the month, whether because of changes in consumer spending habits or because of the way the days fell this year, we will put our a ‘Late peak in flight searches’ press release once we have the full month’s data.

Thanks, Robin

Posted by Robin Goad | January 9, 2009 12:48 PM

Hi Robin,

Thanks for the detailed reply and the extra data.
Few more thoughts from me :

1)If airlines and travel companies are getting their email marketing better than last year then they will be seeing more direct clicks and taking away the need to search.

2)XL gone and the big four down to the big two may mean people don't need to search for flights. They pretty much know who flies from their local airport. Maybe if you look at serches by airline brand you will see an increase?

3)There is a low cost airline flying to Iceland. It's called IcelandExpress. For Finland, easyJet flies to Helsinki.

4)I didn't expect to see Egypt at the bottom of the list. Other travel industry analysts have been tipping Egypt as, like Turkey, a strong non Euro destination.

Posted by Rob Barham | January 9, 2009 04:10 PM

Hi Robin,

I believe you were looking at the market share of flight search term traffic to 'all categories'. Therefore might some of the year on year decreases be explained by big increases in other search terms unrelated to traffic e.g. "credit crunch", "redundancy"...etc?

I completely agree that flight searches are going to be down year on year, but certainly not to the extent you're reporting.

Running the same report for flight search traffic to travel websites might be interesting too?

Many thanks

Posted by Chad Thomas | January 13, 2009 10:06 AM

Here is new post with updated data that, I think, addressed any unanswered questions above.

http://weblogs.hitwise.com/robin-goad/2009/01/flight_search_and_travel_update.html

Thanks, Robin

Posted by Robin Goad | January 15, 2009 12:46 PM