Cheapflights.co.uk, the profitable, award-winning and leading UK flights price search and comparison site has started the year well in respect of industry accolades with 10 Internet, travel and business nominations and awards already secured.:
Cheapflights wins Best Travel Website at the Metrixlab 2006 Website of the Year Awards. More than 350,000 votes were cast to select the websites for each category. The title Best Website is provided to the site with the highest average score on content, navigation and design.
Cheapflights.co.uk wins the Wildcard Category of the Imperatives Digital Awards. The website was rated for its easy-to-understand travel results, helpful advice and blog site, Cheap Flight News.
Cheapflights UK is included in the Media Momentum UK's Top 50 Fastest Growing Digital Media Companies 2007. This is the third year that Cheapflights UK has been placed in the top 50 and its ranking (34) represents a jump of four places on last year's position (38). The list features the fastest growing media companies. The Top 50 companies in the 2007 list collectively successfully grew their revenue base from £139m to a staggering £453m in a 2 year period
Hitwise, the internet monitoring service, announced that Cheapflights.co.uk was a Top 10 Online Performance Award Winner for 2006. During 2006, Cheapflights ranked No. 7 by visits among all other UK websites in the Hitwise Travel – Agencies cateory.
Cheapflights wins Imperatives Digital Awards Wildcard Category. The awards celebrate the progressiveness of the UK interactive sector and are awarded to those who show true innovation- not just the biggest budget. They recognise those dotcoms who show true imagination and digital savvy, whether that be from the confines of the biggest firm or the smallest back bedroom.
Nominated as finalist in Travolution Magazine Travel Awards 'Best Price Comparison' website; This award is open travel search/price comparison sites that have achieved the greatest impact in their market during 2006. This can be based on an increase in traffic, new channels or partnerships, or the introduction of innovative tools and functionality.
Nominated finalist in S.E. Regional National Business Awards sponsored by Orange categories: "The 3i Growth Strategy Award" and "The Business Innovation of the Year Awards";
The Growth Strategy Award is open to both public and private sector companies and looks for the organisation that can best demonstrate an organic growth strategy (rather than merger & acquisition activity) that has achieved outstanding levels of sales, profit and market share improvement and has achieved exceptional, sustainable organic growth in any market sector.
The Business Innovation of the Year category is awarded to the organisation that can best demonstrate a proven ability to create, nurture and develop innovations or processes that substantially improve the commercial performance or prospects of the company.
CEO David Soskin nominated in the prestigious World Travel Awards as "A Travel Technology Personality of the Year".
Hitwise Top Ten Travel Award for January-March 2007 for most popular sites by visits among all United Kingdom websites in the Hitwise Travel - Agencies category. The Hitwise awards recognise the leaders in their industry field by highlighting the most popular sites according to the percentage of user visits a website receives. Cheapflights has been consistently ranked in the top ten in the travel category for the past 18 quarters.
Accolades apart, Cheapflights most values its ongoing traffic growth, not only in the US market where growth is over 100% year on year but also on its home turf in the UK. This is representative of the most important accolade of all, the vote of its consumer bargain hunters for flights deals. Cheapflights is therefore pleased to report that in a special analysis by global leader in internet media and market research, Nielsen//NetRatings ("NetRatings") that it continues to maintain its leading top ten position in their UK Travel Multi-Category for March 2007. Cheapflights is the 6th most popular Nielsen multi-category travel site behind brands such as Expedia, Lastminute and TUI. The analysis covered statistics from both home and work computer use in the UK.
Although Cheapflights is a pure flights prices search and comparison dotcom, its traffic is often rated by independent sources alongside that of online travel agencies, aggregators, airlines, budget airlines and travel meta-search price comparison sites whose traffic often includes holidays, hotels and car hire rather than just flight price deals. Since August 2006, Cheapflights.co.uk's flight price search and comparison traffic obtained from consumers looking online for excellent flights deals has consistently placed it in NetRatings’ top ten multi-category travel sites.
NetRatings' analyses review the total number of unique users that have visited a Website or used an application at least once in the specified reporting period. Persons visiting the same Website or using the same application more than one time in the reporting period are only counted once. NetRatings' analyses also report unique users as a percentage of the total Active Internet population for specified reporting period. On that basis Cheapflights UK flights search and comparison was well ahead of the closest UK travel price comparison site in March.
Cheapflights is committed to reviewing its traffic, where possible, by independent review. It was one of the first dotcoms to embrace traffic audit in the UK by ABCe. ABCe is the industry owned, tri-partite, not-for-profit organisation that works with and for media owners, advertisers and media buyers to help them better understand and gain confidence in the data they use and which provides half-yearly audited traffic reports. In January 2007 Cheapflights.co.uk was audited by ABCe as achieving a record 3.3 million unique UK users.
As an international flights price search and comparison dotcom, with a presence in the USA (http://www.cheapflights.com), launched May 2003, and Canada (http://www.cheapflights.ca) light launched in April 2007, Cheapflights refers traffic downstream on both sides of the Atlantic to large number of the travel sites reviewed by NetRatings. Cheapflights' global pure flights search traffic is now circa 6 million unique users monthly and last year Cheapflights' sites referred an estimated US$1.8 Billion worth of flights sales business to its global advertising partners.
Commenting, Hugo Burge, Vice Chairman and Head of International at Cheapflights said: "We are delighted to accept the industry accolades but what we rate the most is traffic from our loyal users. As a result we attach great importance to the independent research analysis provided by Nielsen//NetRatings as, in conjunction with other research sources, it helps us reach a balanced view of how we are rated in the online travel category. That Neilsen shows us leading travel search in the UK and showing such prominence in the travel sector is a great accomplishment given that we do no offline advertising. With our customer focus being on both consumers and our advertisers, it's important for us to obtain neutral traffic analysis and understand just how much traffic we have and where this is received from and directed to. NetRatings, with its emphasis on researching both home and office computer locations helps us to achieve this."
Alex Burmaster, Nielsen//NetRatings' European Internet Analyst added: “It’s vitally important for anyone within the travel industry to understand the figures they use and how these figures have been arrived at. An issue for the travel industry, for example, is sites that count unsolicited pop-unders to inflate traffic figures. We are committed to providing companies like Cheapflights with insight into genuine audience figures.”
Notes to Editors
Cheapflights Ltd.: Founded in 1996 and profitable since launch, Cheapflights is the UK’s leading UK flight price comparison web and pioneered the travel price comparison model on the internet. It also introduced pay-per-click in the UK in 2000. Cheapflights is one of the few British internet companies successfully to establish an operation in the USA. Launched in May 2003, and currently with 2.6 million unique users a month it is already in the top 13 USA travel sites (Hitwise US).
Cheapflights does not sell any flight deals or travel products. Each day, it sorts millions of flight prices from hundreds of travel partners worldwide. It then publishes a filtered current list of the best deals. These deals can be accessed online or by telephone direct with the advertiser from links or information on our site. This makes Cheapflights one of the most comprehensive independent online publishers of flight deals available. It also has well established opt-in subscription weekly newsletters on both sides of the Atlantic with over 4 million subscribers. The Company has launched UK and USA "Flight News" blog sites, http://news.cheapflights.co.uk; and http://news.cheapflights.com. These have become major interactive communities to inform and assist travel consumers on both sides of the Atlantic.
Hitwise's statistics show Cheapflights as being the UK's top vertical search and comparison site for the past 17 quarters. Cheapflights now accounts for just under 1% of all UK PPC advertising and 3.2% of all UK online travel display adverts according to recently released IAB figures. The Company's unique user numbers reached almost 6.00 million globally in January 2007.
Cheapflights estimates that it generated travel product sales of over US$1.8 billion for its advertising partners in 2006. These advertisers read like a Who’s Who of the travel world - ranging from British Airways, Thomson, Expedia, Travelocity and Thomas Cook to specialist operators like STA Travel , Mark Warner and Iglu.com.
In January 2007 Cheapflights invested in the Icelandic global flights planner, dohop ltd and is represented on the dohop.com Board. The dohop.com free website enables travellers to research available flight routes and scheduled departures and arrivals worldwide and operates as a separate business to Cheapflights. It facilitates journey planning and is particularly helpful for finding unusual flight connections. David Soskin and Hugo Burge, CEO and Vice Chairman respectively of Cheapflights launched HOWZAT media LLP, in January 2007, an investment fund for start-up and early stage dotcoms. It will seek out global opportunities in internet media, including, but not exclusively, in the travel sector. Sites already invested in: social networking travel site www.wayn.com; residential property vertical search site www.zoomf.com; and www.TrustedPlaces.com a next generation reviews and social networking website focussed on recommended places to socialise, eat and drink. Cheapflights' status as an independent online travel price search and comparison and travel news site makes it a natural starting point for finding travel deals and up-to-date travel industry information from a neutral source.
