Ancillary revenues boost Dohop

A rise in ancillary revenues has helped replace income from advertising on flight meta-search site Dohop.

The company removed all advertising from the site and scrapped its in-house hotel search last year, opting instead for a whitelabel solution.

Dohop said the strategy appears to have paid off in the first quarter of 2011, as users no longer go elsewhere to search for hotels.

Revenue from the ancillary streams of hotels and car hire doubled in the first three months of the year over the same period in 2010.

For April and the first two weeks of May, flight search accounted for 75% of the revenue, with hotels and rental cars filling in the other 25%, the highest ratio yet.
In contrast, for the early months of 2010 affiliate revenue from the company’s flight search accounted for about 90% of revenue with advertising, hotels and rental cars together accounting for the remaining 10%.

Traffic was also up in the first quarter in 2011, with a 45% increase over the same period last year.

Chief executive Kristjan Bjarnason said: “Our users would use us for flights but then go off-site for hotels and rental cars. This seems to be changing and we are very happy about it.

“We expect to see this change further as the year progresses, with our users learning about and getting to trust the hotel part of Dohop, along with the great rental car service. And when we release our mobile app, we expect hotel bookings to increase as well.”