Zoom Airlines, the UK / Canadian budget long haul carrier, has grounded its planes and is preparing to go into administration. Following the announcement yesterday, UK Internet users flocked to its website. www.flyzoom.com became the 8th most visited website in our Commercial Airlines category, entering the top ten for first time in its short history.

For customers booked to fly with Zoom, their main priority is to find replacement tickets with other airlines. Looking at the downstream traffic from Zoom’s website yesterday (illustrated in the table below), the largest beneficiary was British Airways, followed by FlyGlobeSpan and Canadian Affair. Almost 40% of the site’s downstream traffic went to other travel sites yesterday, with Air Canada, Virgin Atlantic, and Glasgow Airport also included in the top 20.

The downstream data also reveals some other interesting aspects of consumer behaviour when faced with this sort of situation. 15.6% of people went to a search engine, presumably choosing to find their own alternatives rather than follow Zoom’s links to competitor airlines. The appearance of credit card company Egg in the clickstream reveals that a number of people chose to follow consumer advice and contact their bank in order to find out about refunds / compensation. And finally there are the people who went to Facebook, presumably to vent their frustration or look for advice on groups such as We LOVE Zoom Airlines and Zoom UK.