The Most Popular Online Booking Sites in Travel, 2014 Edition

Last year we started a once-a-quarter feature on top trafficked sites in various sectors in travel, using monthly data from competitive intelligence metrics service SimilarWeb.

Previously, we have done data dives on top online booking sites from October 2013 data, and then Feb 2014 data.

This ranking below does not account for direct sites of travel brands (airlines/hotels) themselves, which we have done in separate lists previously. Also, our threshold is roughly 5 million visits per month to the online websites of these companies, and does not count any mobile app activity, hence sites like HotelsCombined, Hipmunk, Ostrovok and others don’t show up.

Some observations from data below:

• We are not combining all companies under one rank (as in all Priceline Group, or Expedia Group), but we’re combining all one-brand specific country sites (brand sites) together (hence all of TripAdvisor country sites are under one ranking).
• Booking.com is still killing it, and growing fast as well, despite its gargantuan size.
• Priceline Group, which includes Booking.com, Priceline.com, Agoda.com and Kayak sites, is the leader by a huge margin.
• Expedia brand (all country domain sites together) is third largest, but Expedia Group, which includes Hotels.com, Trivago, Hotwire and Venere, is the second most popular online travel booking company. And since Travelocity is now just a white-label site for Expedia, those 10.6 million visitors could count towards its total, too.
• TripAdvisor is surely the biggest media-plus-booking site globally, and the second most popular brand if you add up all country-specific sites.
• Remarkably, Airbnb is now the fifth most popular online travel booking site, and is insanely addictive when you count the time spent on site. Part of it has to do with the design of the site, meant to be browsed more leisurely; the other part is more endemic, where users have to browse more listing in sharing/rentals to come to the right choice.
• HomeAway and sister site VRBO are in similar category as Airbnb, and as addictive when it comes to time spent on site by users.
• Hotels.com growth is flat, and Expedia knows it.
• Skyscanner is now among the top 10 most popular booking brands globally, and it is now making a big push in U.S. as well.
• MakeMyTrip is now among the top 10 most popular online booking sites globally, and is the only local site to reach that high, showing the potential and size of online travel market in India and beyond. Other Indian sites Cleartrip and Yatra are also in the Top 30 list globally.
• The shine is off the growth of HotelUrbano.com, the Brazilian hotel booking site, for now, but it is still in the Top 15 most poplar sites.
• Travelocity is declining, and are we have covered previously, a sitting target to be bought, likely by partner Expedia.
• Looks like Trivago’s various country sites are now seeing the network effects from being part of Expedia, and its traffic is rising fast.
• AirFastTickets.com, the enigmatic Greek OTA which has been advertising all over NYC last few months, has now nearly broken into top 30 ranks.
• AviaSales, the Russian travel search engine, is rising fast in the ranks, after a big capital injection earlier this year.
• SimilarWeb’s traffic analytics for China and Russia aren’t very robust, and ranks below are likely not indicative of their true size.
• Any other insights based on this data below? Any other big names we’re missing? Post in comments below.