Travel bookings are no longer the whole story as advertising and referral-based business models gain ground.

Sherman, Conn. USA�Just over half of the top 200 travel Web sites in February 2008 were booking Web sites. The remaining were referral and media sites, which attract travel shoppers with expert and traveler-generated reviews, metasearch capabilities, and maps of travel destinations.

Travel industry research authority PhoCusWright and Hitwise partnered to track and analyze the online travel space. The resulting report, Search, Shop, Buy: Inside The Tangled Web of Online Travel uses traffic data from Hitwise to determine how Travel 2.0, the Long Tail and search are affecting the online travel space, tracing the trends that are emerging throughout the travel search, shopping and buying processes.

"Search and shopping sites are having a major impact on the travel category, and their power is expected to grow as the slowing economy prompts travelers to spend even more time searching for travel deals," said Cathy Schetzina, technology analyst for PhoCusWright. "This trend underlines the need for travel suppliers and intermediaries to target search marketing and online advertising efforts based on a clear understanding of online travel shopping patterns."

Also among the report's findings about the trends impacting online travel:

-While travelers continue to report shopping at an online travel agency site and then switching to a supplier site to book (and vice versa), online travel agencies and suppliers in fact lose more downstream traffic to competitors of the same type of site. -Metasearch sites were initially hailed as a boon to suppliers, but online travel agencies are in fact the top beneficiaries of these sites. Despite the fact that two general social networks rank within the top 10 sites on the Web overall, only two travel-specific social networks appear within the top 200 travel Web sites. -The report also analyzes fast-growing travel Web sites based on increase in visits year over year, search engine traffic to the travel category, including search term patterns, and lifestyle descriptions for online travel shoppers.

Search, Shop, Buy: Inside The Tangled Web of Online Travel is available for purchase from PhoCusWright at www.phocuswright.com or by contacting PhoCusWright sales via email at sales@phocuswright.com or +1 860 350-4084 x501.

About PhoCusWright Inc. PhoCusWright is the travel industry research authority on how travelers, suppliers and intermediaries connect. Independent, rigorous and unbiased, PhoCusWright fosters smart strategic planning and tactical decision-making.

PhoCusWright delivers qualitative and quantitative research on the evolving dynamics that influence travel, tourism and hospitality distribution. Our marketplace intelligence is the industry standard for segmentation, sizing, forecasting, trends, analysis and consumer travel planning behavior. Every day around the world, senior executives, marketers, strategists and research professionals from all segments of the industry value chain use PhoCusWright research for competitive advantage.

To bring this intelligence to life, PhoCusWright produces several high-profile conferences in the U.S., Germany and India, and partners with conferences in the U.K., China and Singapore where industry leaders gather to debate issues, share ideas and define the ever-evolving reality of travel commerce.

The company is headquartered in the United States, with offices in Germany and India. www.phocuswright.com

About Hitwise Hitwise is the leading online competitive intelligence service. Only Hitwise provides its 1,400 clients around the world with daily insights on how their customers interact with a broad range of competitive websites, and how their competitors use different tactics to attract online customers.

Since 1997, Hitwise has pioneered a unique, network-based approach to Internet measurement. Through relationships with ISPs around the world, Hitwise's patented methodology anonymously captures the online usage, search and conversion behavior of 25 million Internet users. This unprecedented volume of Internet usage data is seamlessly integrated into an easy to use, web-based service, designed to help marketers better plan, implement and report on a range of online marketing programs.

Hitwise, a subsidiary of Experian (FTS: EXPN)�www.experiangroup.com�operates in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore. More information about Hitwise is available at www.hitwise.com.

For up to date analysis of online trends, please visit the Hitwise Intelligence-Analyst Weblogs at http://weblogs.hitwise.com and the Hitwise Data Center.

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Media Contact: Lorraine Sileo, PhoCusWright Inc. 1 860 350-4084 x130 lsileo@phocuswright.com