NEEDHAM, MA - March 3, 2003 - TripAdvisor, the leading travel search engine, announced today that it is now a top 15 worldwide travel site according to ComScore Networks. Additionally, the company announced it has experienced more than 300% growth in traffic over the last year, recording 2.9 million unique monthly visitors in January 2003. For this same month, TripAdvisor ranked higher in popularity than leading travel sites such as United.com, British Airways, Trip.com, Lonely Planet, Marriott.com, Hilton.com and Amtrak.com.
TripAdvisor has also marked its twelfth consecutive month of profitability. The company's success is linked not only to its growing popularity but also to a winning business model. Similar to the other successful "pay for performance" search engines (Google and Overture) but with a particular focus on travel, TripAdvisor has found a large and growing audience with travel marketers looking for a cost effective way to market their travel products. TripAdvisor's customers include such leading travel marketers as Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz, Trip.com, and CheapTickets.
"TripAdvisor has thrived and become a top 15 travel site worldwide by addressing an unmet need - travel research on the web," said Steve Kaufer, CEO of TripAdvisor. "While many travel sites provide extensive booking capabilities, consumers, to date, have been frustrated trying to research the Internet for articles, opinions and reviews of destinations, hotels or activities in a given city. Our ability to deliver highly relevant travel information to consumers is the key to the success of our business model. In the end we deliver relevance to the consumer in the form of valuable research and relevance to our commerce partners in the form of qualified buyers."
One Stop Web Destination for Travel Research
TripAdvisor.com is the only dedicated travel search engine that helps consumers research the most relevant travel information on the web. In the last year, TripAdvisor has added new geographies and features to make TripAdvisor.com the most popular, one stop web destination for planning vacations. Among the most popular features introduced this year is its TripWatch newsletters, the first fully personalized, time sensitive email newsletters for the travel industry, with more than 200,000 subscribers. Additionally, TripAdvisor launched its Hotel Popularity Index, the first of its kind to dynamically rank the most popular hotels worldwide according the quantity and quality of content written about them on the web.
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