It’s hard to think of an online consumer offering that doesn’t rely heavily on search, and travel is no exception. With economic factors making consumers more price-conscious than ever, travelers are looking for good deals more and more, making search an integral traffic driver for Online Travel Agencies (OTAs).

Expedia is the class of the industry when it comes to search though, with a 26% share. This means that they receive traffic from just over one out of every four clicks (both paid and natural) to a major OTA from search, followed by rivals Travelocity and Orbitz. Priceline has moved into the fourth position by growing its share by nearly 5%, replacing Cheaptickets, which has fallen by almost the same percentage.

Taking a deeper look at paid search traffic specifically, we see that 36% of all search traffic to OTAs comes through sponsored links. Hotels.com leads the way with an average of 44% of search referrals coming from paid search. Expedia is in the advantageous position of being on the lower end of paid search percentage ((34%), despite having such a large search share.

With ever increasing ROI expectations being placed on travel marketers, optimizing the online channel is critical. Given that many of the OTAs are relying more heavily on paid search referrals, and the degree of volatility in this space, it would benefit the OTAs to closely monitor share of search traffic across the competitive landscape.

Compete’s Travel Search Intelligence can fill in the gaps with a web-wide view of your performance, benchmarked against rivals.

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