Cheapflights.co.uk, the UK’s has just received confirmation of its continued growth in traffic from the independent online auditing company ABC Electronic Limited (ABCe).  In figures just released by ABCe, Cheapflights.co.uk.‘s audited July 2006 figures reached 2.72 Million UK unique users for flights traffic alone. Last year’s comparative ABCe figures of 2.87 million contained additional traffic numbers from the company’s holiday, short break and accommodation sites all of which were disposed of earlier this year.  This year’s figure confirms the continued growth in flight price search and comparison traffic on Cheapflights.co.uk

In August 2006, data from Hitwise, the online competitive intelligence service, revealed that there were 2,088 sites within its Travel Agencies sector in the UK (“Travel agencies and businesses which provide planning and organisation services for holiday and travel”), with Cheapflights.co.uk accounting for 2.85% market share of visits to the category. This is a 14% year on year growth, moving the website up from eighth position in August last year and maintaining the seventh position held over the past quarter. Cheapflights has been a winner of the coveted Hitwise Top 10 award in its sector for the last sixteen quarters.

In the UK, among the top 100 sites in Hitwise’s UK Travel Agencies sector in May, analysis by Hitwise showed that there were 11 that they would classify as either price comparison or vertical search sites. These sites accounted for just over 1 in every 10 UK visits to the overall Travel Agencies category and Cheapflights.co.uk occupied the top ranking within this vertical search site group.

Internal July log files for Cheapflights’ USA site, Cheapflights.com, which was launched just over three years ago, show that it continues to gain rapidly on its UK parent, with its traffic reaching 1.9 million unique users.  According to Hitwise USA in July,  Cheapflights.com’s year on year market share doubled, representing just under 1.0% of visits to their Travel Agency sector websites in the US, ranking the website at Number 14 out of 1,414 travel agency sites

Cheapflights’ non-commercial travel news blog sites www.news.cheapflights.co.uk and .com launched in October last year respectively in the UK and USA also continue to attract increasing traffic and in July they received 234,000 unique users.

Commenting, Cheapflights CEO David Soskin said:

“The extraordinary phenomenon about Cheapflights is that it constantly achieves increasing traffic growth and maintains or increases market share without recourse to any form of above the line advertising. 

We believe that this is because we constantly strive to improve the user experience of both our advertising partners and also that of our users, the travelling public.  Our recently launched Partner Portal - allowing real time monitoring and analysis of the deals published on our site by our partners - and a new programme of product innovation, catering for the increasingly sophisticated demands of the travelling public, are evidence of our ongoing commitment to both.”
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