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Hitwise Intelligence - Sandra Hanchard - Asia Pacific

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Airline Wars - Qantas and Virgin Blue battle it out online

January 27, 2006

As Australians returned to work in January from the Christmas and New Years break, airlines engaged in aggressive online marketing to entice web users to book flights early for the year ahead. Hitwise data report a spike in visits to the Aviation - Commercial Airlines category of 51% between December 10, 2005 and January 7, 2006, where daily usage peaked on January 3, as most consumers returned to work.

Hitwise daily traffic analysis shows that Qantas and Virgin Blue closely mirrored each other in online peaks and troughs between November 2005 and early January 2006. While Virgin Blue surged ahead in all categories on January 3 and January 11, 2006 with 0.23% on both dates, Qantas has fought back with market share spikes on January 17 (0.21%) and January 23 (0.19%).

Email marketing, according to Hitwise Industry Clickstream data, was a significant source of referral traffic to airline websites over the holiday period, with an upstream traffic peak of 6.73%, week ending December 24, 2005. The Qantas Frequent Flyer 20% discount offer on January 23, which was promoted via email, is likely to have been a direct cause of the surge of traffic to the Qantas website on that date. Hitwise Search Intelligence shows that the most popular variation on the term frequent flyer was 'qantas frequent flyer' with 39.1% of searches, for the 12 week period ending January 21, 2006.

Virgin Blue's Velocity frequent flyer program attracted a significant amount of online attention when it was launched in November 2005, debuting at 4th position in the Aviation category. The search term 'velocity rewards' reached a peak during the week ending December 17, 2005.