Trends Q: Resort website traffic was down in 2013, but did it rebound in 2014?

Last year we looked at two years of visitor data in search of a trend for resort website traffic. Unfortunately, that trend was down. This week we’re revisiting this analysis to find out how resort websites have fared since then. Were they down again, on the way back up, or flat? That was this week’s question, here is this week’s answer.

The Goods
To find this year’s trend we used the same metrics as before provided by Compete; the top 50 resort websites acting as our sample set. This time we also added total visits into the mix as well. We found the average for each month and plotted it on the chart below. Here’s how it came together.

After seeing a fairly significant drop last year, numbers seem to have leveled out for the time being. In fact, taking the average of Aug 2012 – July 2013 and comparing it to Aug 2013 – Jul 2014 shows a slight increase (+3.8% for uniques, +0.9% for total) this year over last.

What This Means
Our theory last year was not that people were abandoning resorts’ web real estate, but simply that these interactions were shifting away from resort-owned websites in favor of social pages and accounts. This data, along with recent trends in the social realm, may support this theory.

With Facebook pushing the pay-to-play approach and organic reach dropping, these numbers may indicate an effort by resorts to shift interactions back toward resort websites. We often say this with YOY analyses, but seeing where these numbers stand in 2015 will be very, very interesting.

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