We’ve all heard of the term “revenge travel” right? The wonderfully coined practice of traveling as a way of making up for lost time during the pandemic.
Travel is in high demand these days as people are taking back their freedom. We’re all yearning for a little adventure after years of mandatory couch potato life. Now it’s only natural for us to have residual COVID concerns or anxieties about the economy and inflation.
Yet after seeing a new report from top travel agencies on December’s web traffic, you wouldn’t know it.
As stated by Similarweb, a digital intelligence platform, TripAdvisor, Airbnb, Booking.com, and Expedia were delighted by heightened visitor traffic on a monthly and yearly basis. This paints 2023 as a promising year for the travel industry.
The boost for Booking.com was particularly hearty with a 28% increase in year-over-year traffic in December. Tripadvisor is the largest platform with ever growing popularity. The site’s yearly visitor count was an astounding 89 million.
This is 15% higher than the previous year. Another competitor, Expedia saw roughly 17% growth with 67 million site visitors. This is the same amount of visitors Airbnb experienced. Although, they fell behind the others in year-over-year growth with a meager 6%.
Who knew a global pandemic could be so lucrative for the travel industry?
Kudos to Booking.com’s impressive progression by gaining nearly two percentage points, more than any of its competitors.
Despite the changing traffic shares, Tripadvisor remained superior with 32% of the total share of traffic, followed by Expedia and Airbnb at 24% and Booking.com at 20%.
All four OTAs saw an average of 8% month-over-month growth in December with no signs of slowing down. Similarweb’s senior insights manager, Jim Corridore, says “People are choosing experiences over other types of purchases with their discretionary income, and of those experiences they are choosing travel.”
Every corner of travel will be positively affected by this influx in consumer demand for experiences. Think cruises, car rentals, vacation rentals, airlines, etc.
After a couple of stagnant years, the industry deserves the decent growth we are seeing today. Revenge travel is all the rage. Who knew the word revenge would generate such prosperity?