Hotel brands have made great efforts in in the past two years to strengthen their online presence, and have made public commitments to offer the best price by booking on the hotel website. They have also stepped up their online marketing efforts and are in many cases competing directly with travel agencies.

Hitwise reveals that whilst Hotel websites are making gains from search engines, they continue to rely heavily on their brand for traffic. This Hitwise analysis was prepared using a custom category of the top 20 Hotel websites based on UK visits in April.

Top 20 Hotels by market share of UK Internet visits, April 2007 (based on a custom category)

More than half of traffic to Hotel websites comes from search

• The Search Engines category accounted for 52.55% of visits to the Hotels category (custom) for the month of April 2007.
  
  
  
  1. Traffic from search engines has increased year on year by 9.4%.
  
  
  
  2. Yahoo! UK had the largest increase year on year of the top five search engines with 29% increase in visits to the Hotels category.
  
  


• 15.77% of traffic to the Hotels category came from websites within the Travel – Destinations and Accommodation category (which includes other hotel websites and agencies such at Active Hotels and Lastminute.com). Traffic from this category was up 15% year on year in April 2007. Upstream visits from websites in the Hotels custom category are also up, indicating that consumers are increasingly comparing offers among hotel and agency websites.



• Laterooms UK was the top upstream booking site to the Hotels custom category week ending 26th May with www.expedia.co.uk and www.activehotels.com second and third respectively. Traffic from Laterooms has increased year on year by 50%.

Hotel search traffic still brand dependent

• The number one search term accounting for 7.39% of search traffic to the Hotels custom category was “travel lodge”.



• The term “hotels” was the only non-branded search term appearing in the top 50 search terms for the Hotels custom category during the four weeks ending 26th May. The term ranked 44 among the 10,498 unique search terms sending visits to the category.



• Hotel websites are heavily reliant on searches for their brand for traffic. An opportunity exists to target generic keywords, including location specific terms.

Some pay for their brand while others enjoy organic traffic

Travelodge, the number one Hotel website receives the smallest amount of traffic from paid search, with 3% of search traffic coming from paid listings. This is far below the average for the top 10 Hotel websites of 28.9%:

• Travelodge illustrates the importance of brand to visits for hotel websites. In the week to 26th May 2007, 56% of the site’s traffic came from search, and 61% of this search traffic came from the top two variations of searches for the brand, “travel lodge” and “travelodge”.



• Travelodge has the strongest brand strength among Hotels with a larger volume of searches for the Travelodge brand than any brand in the Hotels category.


Intercontinental Hotels Group received the largest share of its search traffic from paid listings among the top 10 Hotels websites, at 57% :



• The top terms sending traffic to the website were brand names from the stable of IC Hotels brands.



IC Hotels may opt to bid on its various brands to secure more “real-estate” on the search engine results page. Also, by bidding on the brand, IC Hotels is able to control the ad copy and the landing page, perhaps making the ad more appealing.