Low-Cost Airlines Rule In Traffic Ranking Of Top Airline Sites Globally

Ed: We’re starting a new monthly feature on top trafficked sites in various sectors in travel, using data from SimilarWeb. We have found SimilarWeb’s traffic stats to be the most reliable barometer of consumer web activity, easily besting other comparison sites like Quantcast, Compete, Alexa, and others.

Yesterday we looked at the top online booking sites around the globe, and today we're looking at the top airline sites from around the world, traffic wise, for October 2013. The biggest observation: the low-cost carriers are ascendant in online, driving tons of traffic, with Ryanair, AirAsia, easyJet and Southwest being the top four airline sites on the planet.

There is a big structural reason for the high traffic to these sites: low-cost airlines prohibit online booking sites such as Priceline, Expedia, and others to show their fares, so the airline sites are the only direct source of booking the tickets for them. Plus, many of them add fees for booking via any method other than online. So voilà!, lots of internet traffic. It helps explain why Ryanair runs advertisements for other travel providers on its website.

Then, besides the biggest U.S. airlines and British Airways, Emirates and Turkish are on the up, driven in large part by their general marketing savviness. Latin American, Japanese, and additional low-cost carriers make up the rest.