Thomas Cook wins battle of the big guns for ‘holiday’ searches

By Travolution

Thomas Cook won the battle of the big guns for holiday searches on Google in May, beating its main rival Thomson and its all-inclusive brand First Choice, a Greenlight report has revealed.

But all three were beaten to the top spot for natural search by travelsupermarket.com which achieved a 53% share of voice for the 4.4 million ‘holidays’ search term queries.

The breakdown for search activity on desktops/laptops and mobile saw travelrepublic.co.uk claim top spot for mobile, although the leading OTA did not feature in the top 20 for desktops.

In the paid media sector, however, Travel Republic claimed top spot bidding on 2,864 keywords at an average position of five, ahead of rival OTA On The Beach and deals aggregator holidaydiscountcentre.co.uk.

Rival deals sites icelolly.com, trivago.co.uk and teletextholidays.co.uk were fifth, eighth and ninth respectively.

On mobile in May icelolly.com was the most visible paid search advertiser ahead of secretescapes.com, teletextyholidays.co.uk and onthebeach.co.uk.

The number of holiday-related keyword searches stood at 881,536 on mobile devices, still some way short of the 3.5 million generated on desktops.

The 12-month trend for search activity in this sector sees mobile remaining relatively flat while desktop saw a marked slump between June and November followed by a shallow recovery after January.

In the overall integrated search Thomas Cook was top both on mobile and desktops, followed by travelsupermarket.com and First Choice on both categories of devices.

Greenlight’s social media top 15 chart saw Thomson turn the table on Thomas Cook, coming out on top thanks to a market-leading number of Facebook fans and Youtube subscribers and a Klout score of 84.

Thomas Cook has the most Twitter followers among the top 15 (43,933) but a low number of Google+ followers (1,537).

Travel Republic, in 12th in the social media chart has approaching ten times the Google+ followers of its nearest rivals with 1.5 million.

Trivago.co.uk in 15th has the most Facebook fans (1.4 million) well ahead of Thomson (400,629), lowcostholidays.com (252,266) and Thomas Cook (221,402).