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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

Analyst Weblog

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Increase in traffic to train, bus and coach websites

May 26, 2009

Despite positive news from Virgin Atlantic today, there is no doubt that these are tough times for the airline industry. UK Internet traffic to websites in our Aviation – Commercial Airlines category (which is dominated by the airline's homepages) was down by 19.2% between April 2008 and April 2009. However, one area of the travel industry seems to be thriving online despite – or perhaps, because of – the recession is public transport. As the chart below illustrates, UK Internet visits to a custom category of the top train, bus and coach websites increased by 3.7% between April 2008 and April 2009.

UK_Internet_visits_to_airline_train_bus_coach_websites_2009_2008_chart.png

During April 2009 there were 39 train, bus and coach websites amongst the 500 most popular travel websites in the UK. The National Rail website was the fourth most visited website overall in our Travel category last month, and the highest placed non-map site of the 18,390 travel websites we monitored (Google Maps UK, Google Maps US and Multimap took the top 3 positions). As the table below illustrates, our category was dominated by train sites, with Trainline taking second place. National Express, which has recently undergone a successful rebranding exercise, picked up 3 of the top 10 slots.

Top_uk_public_transport_websites_national_rail_trainline_national_express_april_2009_table.png

Another sign that trains have become more popular is that UK Internet searches for the term ‘train times’ have increased by 1.5% over the last year. For the 12 weeks ending 23/05/09, ‘train times’ was the most 96th most popular search term in the UK. It was also the fourth most popular non-branded term, ranking behind only ‘jade goody’, ‘weather’ and ‘tv guide’.

For a list of the top 100 travel and retail websites in the UK, download the special third anniversary edition of the IMRG-Hitwise Hot Shops List. To keep up to date with the latest online stats, follow Hitwise UK on Twitter.