30 April 2011

US Travel Q1 2011. Decline in Transactions. OTA Impact

At the Open Travel Advisory meeting in Las Vegas this past week Henry Harteveldt from Forrester showed that Q1 numbers were down 1.6% in terms of transactions.

I have previously shown that the numbers for the OTA's are also off. Yet digging through Expedia's numbers the information basically points to a lowering of the transactions in air for the US domestic market but not the dollar numbers.

With Expedia's market share in the OLTA bookings at about 41% and stable - we can only think that there is some erosion and share shift amongst the other players. Expedia's share of traffic as measured in UVs seems to have declined in Q1 but there are discrepancies between the Comscore and Hitwise numbers. The former showing stability the latter showing a decline.

Thus we can conclude that Orbitz and Travelocity probably experienced a decline while Priceline grew - ditto Kayak.

With Orbitz isolated in that it cannot sell American Airlines product, we can see that the situation for Orbitz will not be pretty when they report their numbers in the next few days - May 5th to be precise. Click here to listen to the Webcast.

Things will be interesting for a while.

Cheers

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