Booking.com tops Greenlight mobile hotel search chart

Booking.com is leading the way when it comes to hotel searches on mobile devices in the UK market, according to the latest Greenlight report on the sector.

Booking.com is leading the way when it comes to hotel searches on mobile devices in the UK market, according to the latest Greenlight report on the sector.


The leading global hotels specialist was found to have secured an 88% share of voice for hotel-related searches in May.


The overall volume of mobile searches was a quarter that of searches made on desktops and laptops, 522,115 to 2 million, Greenlight found.


The search specialist has just started including mobile traffic as a separate entity in its regular sector reports on the travel industry.


Searches for UK domestic destinations dominated on both platforms over generic, long-haul and short-haul terms although the proportion was four percentage points higher on mobile at 59%.


In natural search results Laterooms.com was the most visible website for hotel related searches on desktops/laptops with 46% share of voice.


The specialist Tui Travel-owned retailer beat tripadvisor.co.uk into second place with lastminute.com, travelsupermarket.com and premierinn.com making up the top five.


Dominant search term ‘hotels’ was queried 135,000 times accounting for 7% of the total and searches for cheap hotels and London hotels were also prominent. On mobile ‘hotels was queried 33,100 times.


Paris, Amsterdam, Barcelona,  Rome, Venice and Benidorm were the top destinations searched for in the short-haul sector.


In long-haul New York, Las Vegas, Dubai Singapore, San Francisco and Miami featured heavily. tripadvisor.co.uk was the most visible site in this category of search.


Booking.com topped the Greenlight paid media chart ahead of Trivago.com and lateroom.com with 88%, 75& and 53% share of voice respectively.


And the Priceline website took a near clean sweep in all the sub-sector search categories, placed at number one for domestic, generic, long-haul and short-haul search terms.


Only secretescapes.com prevented a whitewash, beating booking.com into second in the generic searches on mobile devices table.


This saw booking.com ranked number one for integrated search (natural and paid together), ahead of laterooms.com and trivago.co.uk. The top two was reversed for mobile devices.


Greenlight’s social media study of the 15 top websites for integrated search found tripadvisor.co.uk was the most visible.


The review site’s 830,679 Twitter followers was nearly 10 times that of its nearest rival, Hilton.com, although its Google+ following of 1.4 million was beaten by expedia.co.uk and travelrepublic.co.uk.


Tripadvisor.co.uk’s Klout score was 85, four points ahead if lastminute.com which was one point ahead of Hilton.com.


The Greenlight hotels sector May 2013 report can be downloaded now for free from the firm’s website.