HITWISE UK TRAVEL UPDATE

Travelocity acquisition of Lastminute.com

London, 12^th May 2005

Today’s announcement of the proposed acquisition of Lastminute.com by Sabre-owned Travelocity for £577m heralds continued consolidation in the travel industry. Analysis by Hitwise, the world’s leading online competitive intelligence service, reveals the wisdom behind the deal.

Whilst Travelocity is the second most visited travel agency website in the US, the firm has struggled to gain a stronghold in the UK. “Continued fierce competition and shrinking margins have led firms to pursue scale as the road to profitability,” said Simon Chamberlain, General Manager of Hitwise UK. “Expedia has been extremely successful in the UK, competing with Lastminute.com as the favoured online travel agency among UK consumers. Travelocity has enjoyed a similar position in the US and the acquisition of Lastminute.com may present the most efficient path to better market penetration in the UK market.”

• Travelocity (www.travelocity.com) is the 2^nd most visited Travel Agency website in the US, whilst Lastminute (www.lastminute.com) is the 2^nd most visited Travel Agency website in the UK for April 2005.
  
• Expedia is the leading Travel Agency site in both the UK and US, but the combined forces of Lastminute and Travelocity could, over time, present a viable challenger to this leadership.
  
• Travelocity’s dominance in the US market is underlined by its brand strength. Hitwise search intelligence data shows that “travelocity” is the term which sends the largest volume of visits to Travel Agency websites in the US (2.82% of searches), followed by “expedia” (2.35% of searches) for the 4 weeks ending 7/5/2005.
  
• In contrast, “travelocity” is the 23^rd most popular search term sending visits to Travel Agencies in the UK. For volume of searches, “lastminute” is a stronger brand in the UK than Travelocity but “expedia” has a significant lead on this measure.

About Hitwise:

Hitwise is the world’s leading online competitive intelligence service. Each day, Hitwise monitors how more than 25 million Internet users interact with over 500,000 websites across 160 industry categories.

By monitoring more people, more websites, more often, Hitwise provides marketers with timely and actionable marketing insights on how their online presence compares to competitive websites.  Companies use this information to maximize the return on their online investment, in efforts such as search marketing, affiliate programs, online advertising, visitor segmentation, content development and lead generation.

Hitwise collects Internet usage information via a combination of ISP data partnerships and opt-in mega panels, and complies with local and international privacy legislation as audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers. Founded in 1997, Hitwise is a privately held company, headquartered in New York City and operates in the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore. 

More information about Hitwise is available at www.hitwise.co.uk

For media enquiries, please contact:

Jannie Cahill
jannie.cahill@hitwise.com

Tel: 020 7378 3619