Product category:
Media
News Release from: Cheapflights (with Howzat media and dohop.com)
Edited by the Marketingservicestalk Editorial
Team on 07 August 2007
Cheapflights continues strong growth
The UK and North American flight comparison websites continue to attract new flight deals and advertisers while newsletters are attracting a broad industry advertiser base.
Cheapflights, the leading UK and North American internet media travel company, which pioneered online flight price search and comparison in 1996, enjoyed very strong growth in the first six months of 2007 on both sides of the Atlantic The launch of Cheapflights' US site in May 2003 has helped power an increase in sales of 71 per cent a year between 2004 and 2006
This article was originally published on Marketingservicestalk on 25 Apr 2007 at 8.00am (UK)
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This excellent profitable growth pattern has continued and the first six months of 2007 indicate that Cheapflights can expect to continue with its rapid growth rate.
The company is also maintaining its high EBITDA margins as its online media model continues to benefit from the growth of online advertising.
Cheapflights.co.uk and Cheapflights.com have again shown solid performances in traffic.
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In particular, Cheapflights.com, launched in May 2003, has seen hyper-growth with its traffic now matching that of Cheapflights.co.uk.
Both sites have seen a record number of users over the past six months.
In addition, the company has continued to recruit management and senior staff to facilitate its planned international expansion and continued advance in the UK and North America.
The focus has been on the strengthening of its technology teams.
Launched over 11 years ago, Cheapflights.co.uk still continues to attract new advertising partners at a rapid rate.
In the UK, leading travel industry companies, including Expedia, Alitalia, Flyzoom.com, Travel Republic and Travelbag have recently joined Cheapflights' extensive list of existing advertisers on its flights search and comparison sites.
The latter include such well-known brands as BA, Virgin Atlantic and Expedia, a long-term US site advertising partner.
As well as these household brands, other travel specialists including Malev, LOT Polish, Ocean Florida, Balkan Holidays and Wise Miser have become Cheapflights advertising partners.
Apart from flight deals advertisers, the company is also seeing huge interest from other travel-related companies in advertising on its weekly opt-in subscriber newsletters.
Originally launched as a "non-commercial" venture to promote the Cheapflights brand name, Cheapflights newsletters have become very much a commercial success in their own right.
Global opt-in newsletter subscribers now stand at over 4 million.
New advertisers include tourist boards, hotels, the cruise sector as well as specialist holiday agents.
These include: the Netherlands Travel Board, Pure Espana, SAS and Warner Breaks and specialist travel agencies such as Corsican Places, Anatolian Sky Holidays and Nita International.
Record Traffic In the year to end June 2007, Cheapflights recorded 56 million visitors (unique users) globally according to company log files.
Unique user traffic for the full month of June was 5.2 million globally, equally split between the UK and USA sites.
Market Share Leading Commercial Positioning Cheapflights continues to perform well in the Hitwise UK Travel-Agencies sector, whilst in the US market share was dramatically up.
Nielsen//NetRatings show Cheapflights as the UK's leading travel price comparison site in June traffic.
In June Cheapflights, according to Hitwise, was the fifth largest search engine provider of visits to the Travel Agencies sector after Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com UK and third search engine provider to the Aviation Commercial Airlines sector after Google and Yahoo - Search UK.
Over the past five years, Cheapflights.co.uk has been the only travel flight price comparison site consistently to feature in the Hitwise UK Quarterly Top 10 Travel Agencies rankings.
(Source: Hitwise).
Cheapflights.co.uk ranked at 8 in the top 10 out of 2032 sites rated by Hitwise in their Travel - Agencies sector traffic ratings for the month of June, 2007 .
The 'Cheapflights.co.uk' website also experienced a rise of 7 places in the Hitwise All Sites rankings during June, 2007 to become the 217th most visited UK website for internet users out of 441,000 UK sites.
The first half was marked not only by excellent commercial progress, but also by considerable strengthening of the management teams on both sides of the Atlantic.
In the past six months, the company has been able to attract further high calibre management and staff both in the UK and in the USA.
They will strengthen and assist Cheapflights' talented team to drive the company's next phase of growth and planned internationalisation.
Another significant achievement has been the fact that Cheapflights has been awarded 13 internet or travel accolades in 2006-2007.
The most recent is the National Business Awards SE Region where Cheapflights won the 3i's Growth Strategy of the Year Award 2007 and was a finalist in the Business Innovation of the Year Award 2007.
The awards are open to companies from all business sectors in the South-East, one of the most competitive, dynamic and innovative business regions in Europe.
To be a finalist, let alone winner is a tribute to the whole Cheapflights' team particularly as the Company won the Growth Strategy Award in 2004.
This demonstrates a consistently successful approach to building the company without recourse to M and A activity or external funding.
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