Over the years travelling has become an important aspect of life, be it travel for business or for a vacation with family & friends. And due to the increase in consumer internet, travel bookings have become extremely easy through websites and apps. The top travel websites are Booking.com, TripAdvisor, Expedia, AirBnB, Hotels.com alongwith brands like Kayak, Priceline, Orbitz, LonelyPlanet and Travelocity. Here is the list of the top 10 travel websites in the world 2016.
10. Travelocity
Originally founded and owned by Sabre Corporation, it is now wholly owned by Expedia Inc.
Image: company website
It acts as an online travel agency and offers the customers a reservation system for hotels, and it has its headquarters in Dallas, Texas. Incorporated in 1966 as a subsidiary of Sabre Holdings, a subsidiary of American Airlines, it pioneered into reservation system where customers can themselves reserve and book air flights, hotels, cars and vacation packages. After AOL’s association with Travelocity, the website gained popularity leveraging on AOL brand value. Its advertising with “The Roaming Gnome” had been successful with the customers. In order to expand its operations it acquired many companies like lastminute.com, site59.com, etc.
Travelocity has been the first website to offer the users to book and reserve their own hotels and flights thereby eliminating the need of a broker. As of today, it is a very popular travel website especially in North America offering 20 million users over thousands of destinations to travel. Due to high competition in this industry, Travelocity was fumbling in recent years and hence was sold to Expedia in 2015 at $280 million and is now a travel website in the portfolio of Expedia Inc. which is leveraging on its high popularity to compete with the other travel and tourism competitors such as The Priceline Group, Kayak, etc.
Unique Website Visitors (millions) - 6months = 13.9
9. Lonely Planet
Originally owned by BBC Worldwide, it was bought by Brad Kelley’s NC2 Media for $77million in 2013.
Image: company website
It is the world’s largest travel guide book publisher with 120 mn books in 11 different languages. Founded by the married couple Tony and Maureen Wheeler, they wrote their first book that consisted of only 94 pages, and within a week, it sold 1500 copies. After the success of their first booklet, they decided to write a travel guide for the Asia subcontinent. Originally known as Lonely Planet Publications, they changed their name to Lonely Planet in July 2009 to show its broad coverage of the travel and tourism industry.
The guide book series first publication was the India Travel guide that was published in 1981 and started expanding its roots in Asia and soon it was known worldwide. Lonely Planet, as of today, has presence in written media through magazines, internet through its website lonelyplanet.com and ‘the Thorn Tree’ community but the community was closed in 2012 as the reviews did not adhere to Lonely Planet’s values and television through its various travel TV series in various countries. After its acquisition, Houghton (present CEO) restructured the company and wanted to get the latest information about locations in real time and termed it as “new content model”. Lonely Planet is still developing this model which will help users with real time information.
Unique Website Visitors (millions) - 6months = 15.2
8. Orbitz
Orbitz Worldwide, Inc. is a part of Expedia and is headquartered in Chicago, Illinois.
Image: company website
Previously a separate company, it was purchased by Expedia in a $1.3 billion deal that was announced in February 2015 and closed in September 2015. Orbitz Worldwide Inc was a separate company earlier and it was then acquired by Expedia in a deal that was announced in Feb 2015 and was finally closed in September 2015. The deal was valued at $1.3 billion. The company is currently headquartered in Citigroup Center, Chicago, Illinois.
Orbitz.com is a part of the flagship brand Orbitz Worldwide and has been operational since 2001. It can be said that Orbitz was founded by the airline industry in response to the boom of various online travel companies like Expedia and Travelocity and was also a feasible way to reduce airline distribution costs.
Various airlines like Continental Airlines, Northwest Airlines, Delta Airlines and United Airlines invested close to $145 million in this project. It was initially called T2, meaning ‘Travelocity.Terminator’, which was later changed to Orbitz in February 2000. The company started beta testing and in June 2001, Orbitz.com was officially launched.
Orbitz operates on a mixed Red Hat Linux and Solaris powered platform and adopted Sun Microsystems’ Jini platform early in a Java environment which was clustered. It has released some parts of its CEP (Complex Event Processing) infrastructure as Open Source. Orbitz filed for an IPO in August 2003 and lost close to $5.3 million in the first half of 2003 based on a revenue of $107 million.
Unique Website Visitors (millions) - 6months = 15.2
7. Priceline
Known for its Name your price system, Priceline.com started with an online platform where users can quote their price for vacation homes, air flight tickets, car rentals and hotels.
Image: company website
The identity of the service provider to the purchaser was only revealed when the transaction would have been made which was nonrefundable. The difference between the price quoted by the user and the service provided by the provider would be the source of revenue for priceline. It has also ventured into many product offerings such as gasoline and home loans through its Name your price system but all these offerings were terminated in 2002 except for home loans. It was founded in 2000 by Jay S Walker. It has its headquarters in Connecticut, United States.
To tap the Chinese market as it’s a huge potential for travel and tourism industry, it has plans to invest $250 million through its Chinese website Ctrip. Recently, because of the heightened competition in the industry, Priceline has having a mediocre year with its CEO Paul J Hennessy resigning and another company Vroom as a CEO and till then the COO and CMO of priceline Brett Keller becoming the interim CEO.
It is one of the most widely used travel websites in the world. With the growing tourism across the world, the business of the company also seems to be picking up pace.
Unique Website Visitors (millions) - 6months = 31.8
6. Kayak
Recently acquired by The Priceline Group in 2013, it works as an independent subsidiary of the group.
Image: company website
It has presence in over thirty countries and eighteen languages and it has its headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut, United States. It helps the consumers to find hotels, flights, vacation packages and rental cars, and is a leading travel website across the world with a high brand recall and strong presence. Founded in 2004 by Steve Hafnar and Paul M. English, it was originally incorporated as Travel Search Company Inc. In 2011, the name was changed to Kayak Software Corporation. To expand its operations internationally, it acquired two companies, one was Swoodoo, a leading travel website based out Germany and the second was checkfelix of JaBo Software, based out of Austria.
In 2010, it listed itself on NASDAQ and went public to raise 50 million. Its share price opened up at $26 per share which was higher than expected and closed at $33.18 showcasing a successful IPO. Its mobile app Kayak also have received various awards for “Best Apps for Business Travelers” as well as “the Best Apps and Websites for Travelers”. In 2009, Time magazine named Kayak as one the best 50 websites and has received many accolades. Though its core business is metasearch booking, it has also started taking direct bookings through other travel websites such Travelocity and orbitz.com.
Unique Website Visitors (millions) - 6months = 36.9
5. Hotels.com
Now a part of Expedia Inc., it boasts over 325,000 properties in 19000 locations.
Image: company website
It has 85 websites in its portfolio which are available in 34 languages and it provides bookings of hotels to the customers through its telephone call centres and localized websites. It aims to offer the customers one-stop point for them to find hotel pricing and availability. It has its headquarters in Bellevue, Washington. Launched in 1991 by David Litman and Robert Deiner, it was initially named as Hotel Reservations Network and used to provide booking through telephone. It was acquired by USA Networks Inc and then it changed its name to Hotels.com whose domain name cost was $11 million in 2002. After this there was a series of rapid expansion both in the domestic and international market.
It also has one unique feature known as Hotels Price Index in which the website publishes twice-yearly review of hotels located both in domestic and international locations based on the number of rooms sold in the hotel’s respective market. It is aimed at media, journalists and the hoteliers. Recently, hotels.com has partnered with Uber to offer the customers a seamless experience while travelling and on a vacation by providing Uber feature in their mobile app. Uber feature will automatically access hotel’s location and current location and the consumers can book their rides easily.
Unique Website Visitors (millions) - 6months = 51.6
4. AirBnB
AirBnB is an online marketplace that connects people who want to rent their property for vacations rentals to people who are looking for rental property by charging a fee.
Image: company website
Started in 2008 by Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia, and after the joining of third co-founder Nathan Blecharczyk, the site airbednbreakfast.com was launched officially which was later shortened to Airbnb.com. It is headquarted in San Francisco, California and it has presence in 191 countries and over 34000 cities with its international offices in 19 countries. The business model followed by Airbnb is peer to peer accommodation with not owning even a single property. It’s a platform for vendors and customers to attract and make transactions. It cuts a service fee from the users and this is the primary source of income for Airbnb.
Recently, Airbnb made its valuation at $24 billion and its looking forward to warn upto $900 milion in revenue this year. In addition to the website,mobile applications for iOS, android and Apple watch are available for the customers so that they can book on the go. Since 2011, it has acquired a lot of travel companies with first acquisition being Accoleo, based in Hamburg. Airbnb has been one of a kind travel website and its creative idea is owed to the founders.
Unique Website Visitors (millions) - 6months = 57.1
3. Expedia
Expedia was established on October 22, 1996 as an online travel company.
Image: company website
It was the property of Microsoft and in 2001 the property was spun off to become a public property, and Rich Barton then became the CEO and Lloyd Frink joined the new independent company. Expedia is headquartered at Bellevue in Washington, and it has a strong global appeal and excellent marketing and brand visibility. It also has localised sites for many countries including Canada, China, Australia, Malaysia and others. It is a very effective website that offers extensive options of hotels to choose from, books online travel tickets, cruises as well as vacation packages at competitive rates for everyone. The site uses Amadeus or the Sabre’s reservation systems for booking flights and uses Pegasus and Worldspan along with its own reservation systems for booking hotels.
It is one of the fastest growing travel portals in Asia and is maintained by AAE Travel Pte Limited which is a Singapore entity. AAE Travel is a joint venture between Expedia Inc. which is the leading internet booking engine and Air Asia which is the best low cost airline in the world.
AAE is headquartered in Singapore and it operates business of Expedia across Asia including china. Expedia also started accepting bitcoins in 2014 and also partnered with Citigroup to create Expedia+ card where bonus points are earned by members and helps members in priority service.
Unique Website Visitors (millions) - 6months = 58.4
2. TripAdvisor
TripAdvisor is a leading name in the world of travel and it claims to be the largest travel site in the world.
Image: company website
It has presence in 48 countries in 28 languages, and has 6.5 million properties and over 170 million user reviews, and it is headquarted in Needam, Massuhusetts. Founded in 2000 by Stephen Kaufer, Langley Steinert, and several others Tripadvisor was started with the idea of professional reviews from travel guides and magazines and not user generated social media. But soon the consumer reviews exceeded the professional ones and they became the travel website as we know today. It works as a aggregator of user reviews and opinion sabout places, destinations, activities, attractions and restaurants of the world and provide a comprehensive information to the consumer so that they can make an informed decision. It has a huge portfolio of websites under Tripadvisor Inc. with 24 travel websites being managed them. They started acquiring these websites from the year 2007.
Tripadvisor has a rich user generated content, a strong travel community, global reach and technological innovations. Leveraging these tools they are able to provide a consumer plan and book their perfect trip. The majority percentage of revenue generated by this travel website is through advertisements- mostly by click based advertising and display based advertising. The other portion comes from transaction based and subscription based offerings.
Unique Website Visitors (millions) - 6months = 144.7
1. Booking.com
Booking.com was founded when the two websites booking.nl and booking.org decided to merge and form one travel website.
Image: company website
Stef Noorden served as the first CEO of the company, and it started as a small startup in 1996 in Enschede, Amsterdam, Netherlands. As of today it boasts 934,835 properties worldwide with 93,820,000 verified reviews, and it has the highest number of unique website visitors. It is headquarted in Amsterdam. In July 2015, The Priceline Group acquired booking.com for $133million. The integration of Active Hotels Limited and booking.com helped The Priceline Group from a financial crisis by improving its financial position from loss in 2002 to profit in 2011. It was touted as the “best acquisition in the Internet History”.
For adveritising, it is the biggest spender on google adwords and has received the award for the same in Travel & Tourism category in 2011. It has also launched many apps such as Booking.com Tonight which helped the customers to book the hotels last minute, i.e., by offering them same night hotels at the discounted prices. Also, to make bookings hassle free for customers they launched an app on native Kindle fire app so that the customers can access their bookings anytime, anywhere. It has received criticism due to its dominant presence in the travel and tourism industry. Competitive authorities in the Czech Republic, United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, Hungary, Switzerland, Austria and Sweden are investigating Booking.com and in 2015, Booking.com dropped its ”rate-parity” clause.
Unique Website Visitors (millions) - 6months = 298.6
Ranking Methodology:
The leading travel websites were considered and based on their unique visitors in a period of 6 months, they were ranked