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Each year, we release our Salience Index: a market report on a sector, telling you everything you need to know SEO-wise. This edition is all about the online travel booking industry.
Inside, you’ll find the top brands, visibility, keyword opportunities and trends, social brand reach, reviews, and page speed. Our Travel Bookings Market Report gives online brands useful insight into how their digital marketing efforts measure up to the competition. You can access it for free: fill in the form and download the report, or keep reading for snippets.
Market spotlight: Loveholidays
One brand that stood out this year was Loveholidays. A relatively young online travel agent launched in 2012, which has been gaining share of voice rapidly in the past few years. How? By investing in evergreen, human-written content. Read our full strategy teardown here.
Travel booking market leaders
Top 10 brands by visibility (current leaders)
| Rank | Brand |
|---|---|
| 1 | tui.co.uk |
| 2 | easyjet.com |
| 3 | skyscanner.net |
| 4 | booking.com |
| 5 | jet2holidays.com |
| 6 | ryanair.com |
| 7 | loveholidays.com |
| 8 | onthebeach.co.uk |
| 9 | expedia.co.uk |
| 10 | kayak.co.uk |
In the past year, the sector has fallen by 20% YoY visibility-wise. But markets rise and fall with trends, consumer confidence, and wider economic conditions.
Key insight: A falling market does not remove opportunity. It raises the value of compounding tactics (evergreen content, technical performance, and brand trust) that keep earning when demand fluctuates.
Brand visibility wins and losses
Within our Travel Booking Market Report, we highlight the brands that gained the most visibility over the year (our top 5 winners) and the brands that fell back (our top 5 losers).
Top 5 winners (YoY visibility change)
| Rank | Brand | YoY |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | easyjet.com | +17% |
| 2 | booking.com | +6% |
| 3 | jet2holidays.com | +13% |
| 4 | loveholidays.com | +20% |
| 5 | onthebeach.co.uk | +92% |
Top 5 losses (YoY visibility change)
| Rank | Brand | YoY |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | expedia.co.uk | -27% |
| 2 | kayak.co.uk | -29% |
| 3 | hotels.com | -28% |
| 4 | travelsupermarket.com | -50% |
| 5 | virginholidays.co.uk | -99% |
Why it matters: Winners show what’s working right now. Losses are often recoverable with sharper keyword focus, improved internal linking, and content that better matches traveller intent.
Keywords and trends in the travel booking industry
Whether you’ve lost visibility and want to regain it, or you’re looking for direction for this year’s SEO campaign, keywords are where momentum starts. In our report, we split keywords into high-competition and opportunity buckets.
High-competition vs opportunity keywords (examples)
| Type | Keyword | UK monthly searches | Competitiveness |
|---|---|---|---|
| High-competition | flights | 372,000 | 84 |
| Opportunity | last minute flights | 19,000 | 10 |
More opportunity examples include “multi city flights” and “last minute all inclusive flights”.
Emerging products (snippet)
- Affordable holiday packages
- Empty leg flights
- Charter flights
Action point: Demand is clustering around budget-led language (cheap, deals, all-inclusive, last minute) and bundled intent (flight + hotel). If these map to your USPs, make them impossible to miss in your category architecture.
The importance of social media and brand reach in the travel booking industry
Social media and brand reach play a big role in SEO: they shape how often people search for your brand, and how strongly your name sticks before travellers enter the booking journey.
In our Travel Booking Market Report, we use an owned social scoring system to determine who’s doing best in social brand reach. Booking.com leads the way with an owned social score of 36,718 and over 20,000,000 followers across Facebook, Instagram and X. Their secret? They use deals, giveaways, reels, and travel guides to drive both inspiration and education.
However, Booking.com’s social presence only landed them eighth on our brand reach score, with 823,000 brand searches a month. First place goes to Skyscanner, with 5,000,000 monthly brand searches.
Why it matters: Branded demand improves conversion rates and reduces reliance on ranking position alone. The more people search your name, the more resilient your acquisition mix becomes.
Trust in the travel booking market
Travel is a high-value purchase. Trust signals like reviews and visible expertise support EEAT and reduce friction at the moment of decision.
Top 10 most trustworthy sites (based on Trustpilot reviews)
| Rank | Site |
|---|---|
| 1 | haystravel.co.uk |
| 2 | jet2holidays.com |
| 3 | opodo.co.uk |
| 4 | trailfinders.com |
| 5 | tui.co.uk |
| 6 | loveholidays.com |
| 7 | travelrepublic.co.uk |
| 8 | uk.trip.com |
| 9 | jet2.com |
| 10 | onthebeach.co.uk |
The fastest travel booking sites
Page speed is a foundational SEO factor and a conversion factor. If your site is slow, you bleed users before they ever reach the checkout. Desktop and mobile both matter across browsing and booking journeys.
Top 10 fastest sites (page speed)
| Rank | Site |
|---|---|
| 1 | skyscanner.net |
| 2 | trivago.co.uk |
| 3 | omio.co.uk |
| 4 | inghams.co.uk |
| 5 | travelsupermarket.com |
| 6 | laterooms.com |
| 7 | sunshine.co.uk |
| 8 | holidaygems.co.uk |
| 9 | intrepidtravel.com |
| 10 | icelolly.com |
Why it matters: Faster sites reduce drop-off rates and create a smoother path to conversion. Speed improvements also amplify the impact of content and links by making every session more likely to stick.
Download our free Travel Booking Market Report
Want to see where your brand stacks up against competitors across visibility, keywords, brand reach, reviews, and technical performance? Download our Travel Bookings Industry Report for free today.
Get the complete travel booking market analysis
If you don’t see your brand, don’t worry. Our data includes all brands in the sector, but we’d be here all day if we listed them all. Get in touch for a personalised report – we’d love to hear from you.
