priceline.com receives most business for online airline tickets booked during Thanksgiving shows study

Airline Industry Information, Dec 17, 1999

AIRLINE INDUSTRY INFORMATION-(C)1997-2000 M2 COMMUNICATIONS LTD

A study has been released by PC Data Online, an Internet research firm, showing that priceline.com received the most business for online airline tickets booked during the Thanksgiving holiday period.

The priceline.com site apparently received 3.2m unique home visits in November, followed by Travelocity.com and expedia.com receiving 2.8m and 1.5m unique visitors each respectively. These figures represent increases of 71% for priceline.com and 8% and 6% for the other two companies over the results for October.

Airline sponsored sites also experienced visitor increases, with iflyswa.com (Southwest Airlines) receiving 1.5m visitors, a 26% increase; Aa.com (American Airlines) recording 1.1m users and delta-airlines.com receiving 979,000 visitors.

Finally, the survey showed that home Internet users favoured booking holiday flights through direct channels rather than using travel agents, with 32% of Thanksgiving flyers booking online, 31% telephoning the airlines directly and 20% booking through a travel agent. Age also seemed to play a part in the way air travellers booked their flights, with 68% of Internet users booking online or via the telephone between the ages of 18 and 34 and 56% between the ages of 35 and 65.

A spokesperson for PC Data Online said that the results said that `Thanksgiving air ticket sales reinforced that direct booking...is eliminating the middleman in air transportation` and that `air travellers want information, but most importantly, want to know the shortest, easiest and least expensive path to book their flights.`

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