U.S. Airline Web Traffic Grew 9% in February 2023, a Slowdown from January’s 25% Gain

Delta and United Airlines gained market share, while American and Southwest saw a dip. Southwest remains the leader in terms of overall web traffic.

Key takeaways

• Aggregated web traffic to the ten largest US airlines grew 9% in February, year over year, based on Similarweb estimates of traffic from within the US. Versus the month of January, web traffic declined by 15%, a worse-than-normal seasonal decline.
• Frontier led the way with 47% web traffic growth, followed by 19% at United and 17% at Delta. Only Allegiant.com saw a web traffic decline (on a year-over-year basis) among the top ten US airlines.
• Southwest.com leads in share of traffic with 22% share, followed by American at 19%, Delta at 17%, and United at 16%. United and Delta each gained one point of share over peers in February, year over year, while American saw its share of traffic dip by 1.6 percentage points.

Similarweb’s monthly market share report shows changes in web traffic and share of traffic among nine U.S. airlines.

February web traffic growth shows demand decelerating

A look at web traffic for the month of February to the ten largest U.S. airlines shows that after the year got off to a strong start in January with 25% growth, year-over-year, February only saw 9% growth. On a month-over-month basis, February contracted 15% from January. In contrast, In 2022, the dip in traffic from January to February was only 3%. In 2021 there was a growth of 4% from January to February. This could be the start of signs of slowing demand.

Nine of ten peers saw year-over-year growth, led by 47% growth at Frontier, 19% growth at United, and 17% growth at Delta. On the weaker side, Allegiant saw a 6% dip in monthly visits, and American grew only 1%.

United, Delta gained market share at the expense of American and Southwest; Frontier also saw gains

Using web traffic as a proxy for market share, you can see that United and Delta both gained share in the month of February, rising by 100 basis points, while American lost 160 basis points of share and Southwest lost 90 basis points of traffic share. Frontier, which saw the most growth in its web traffic also gained share, seeing its overall market share grow by 150 basis points.,

Southwest leads US carriers in share of traffic, followed by American

Southwest Airlines remains the largest US airline in terms of share of web traffic, with a 22% share among the ten peers we looked at in this report. American was second, at 20%, followed by Delta (17%) and United (15%). There was a large lag between these four major airlines and the next largest peer, JetBlue, which had a 6% share of traffic, followed by Frontier (6%), Alaska (5%) Spirit (4%), Allegiant (3%), and Hawaiian (1%).

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Report By: Jim Corridore, Senior Insights Manager

Methodology

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by Jim Corridore

Senior Analyst

Jim provides insights across multiple sectors. With 30 years on Wall Street and numerous awards for stock-picking, he is a SUNY Albany graduate.