Summer Travel: Cruises Boom, Consumers Shop for Deals

June trend is up 11.5% YoY for cruise lines, down -1.7% for airlines, -4% for travel booking, -4.9% for vacation rental, and -10% for popular resorts

Now that the “revenge travel” urge to get away from home post-pandemic has subsided, many travel segments are seeing weak to non-existent growth in digital demand, with cruises as a notable exception. Judging by traffic in May and through the first weeks of June, consumers are less motivated to travel unless they can find a killer deal, perhaps a reflection of overall weak consumer confidence.

For example, of the airlines tracked by Similarweb, only low-cost/no-frills Frontier Airlines showed strong growth, with traffic up 25% year-over-year in May and a similar amount in early June, based on Similarweb estimates. Southwest Airlines doubled the traffic volume to its website during the days it was running a fare sale, but still looks like it will finish the month having attracted less traffic than it did in June 2022. Overall, airline web traffic is running about 11.5% below June 2022 levels.

Many luxury vacation options are showing a similar weakness. For example, our analysis of several popular all-inclusive resorts (sandals.com, atlantis.com, beaches.com, and clubmed.us) found their May/June traffic down about 10%.

Some summer travel is booked months in advance, as is typically true for the cruise industry where the “wave season” of bookings typically occurs between January and March. However, cruise lines are seeing some of the best traffic trends in travel from those seeking last-minute deals or possibly planning a future trip. Hotel websites are also seeing fairly strong traffic growth – although vacation rental websites like airbnb.com and vrbo.com are not.

Key takeaways

• Worldwide traffic to the major cruise line websites was up 20% year over year in May and looks like it will be up 11.5% based on preliminary data for June, according to Similarweb estimates. In the US, cruise line traffic was up 16.5% in May and is up about 15% so far in June.
• In contrast, worldwide airline traffic has been relatively flat, up 1.3% year-over-year in May and down about 1.7% in June, based on preliminary data. In the US, airline traffic was down 2.4% in May and is down about 2.7% so far in June.
• The fastest-growing cruise line brands include:
• • MSC Cruises, with combined traffic to msccruises.com and msccruisesusa.com up more than 100% so far in June.
  • Celebrity (part of Royal Caribbean), up 33.5%, and Princess (part of Carnival Cruise Lines), up 28.2%.
  • Virgin Voyages, which has had one of the industry’s best growth stories, with traffic up 105% in May, looks like it will be up a more modest 28% in June.
• Traffic to major hotel websites was up 5.3% in May and running about 10% higher in June.
• The resumption of business travel is one of the biggest question marks in the travel industry. As a proxy for that demand, we looked at traffic to corporate travel and expense websites amextravel.com and concur.com, which were up about 12-13% year-over-year.

These statistics provide a high-level overview and don’t get to the same detail travel industry users of the Similarweb platform might discover or work with our consultants to find. But in general, we see indicators of consumers searching for deals in their travel shopping.

Overall slower growth

To get an overview of online sales of travel services, we looked at the combined traffic to the top 100 travel websites (filtering for transactional websites as opposed to informational ones) to get a picture of the slowing growth that has occurred overall, compared with the peaks of 2021 and 2022.

The chart for the US looks very similar.

Cruises remain attractive

Cruise lines stand out in the travel industry for continuing to attract consumer interest, even at a time of heightened price sensitivity. MSC Cruises, an established international cruise line that grew out of a shipping company, has been showing some of the strongest growth as it markets more aggressively in the US and worldwide. MSC is also a budget-friendly cruise line, so it ties into the pattern of economy options showing the best performance.

Virgin Voyages, a relatively strong player, has also been demonstrating strong traffic growth.

Virgin Voyages is an example of a relatively small cruise line demonstrating outsize traffic growth, while it’s harder for giants like Carnival and Royal Caribbean to show big gains. Royal Caribbean’s Celebrity brand is also seeing strong traffic growth, up nearly 37% in May and nearly that much so far in June. Traffic for Princess, which is part of Carnival, was up 15% in May and is up 28% so far in June.

Princess is seeing particularly strong gains in Canada, where for the past couple of months it has been attracting more traffic than Norwegian Cruise Lines, which usually dominates in the race for digital traffic.

Airlines feel the drag

Traffic has been trending down, year-over-year, to airline websites. In aggregate, US traffic to the airline sites is down a little over 2%. The exceptions are the ultra-low-cost airlines. Frontier Airlines in particular had traffic up more than 25% year-over-year in May.

Just in the last week or so, Southwest doubled the daily traffic to its site, apparently because of a loyalty program promotion. However, that probably won’t be enough for them to end the month with traffic up overall.

Of the major airlines, the strongest performance we’re seeing is for United, which saw traffic up 7% over the last three months. In May, they were up about 4.3%.

Popular resort destinations are not as popular this year

Popular Caribbean resorts offer cruise-like value with their all-inclusive pricing, but as the summer begins they seem to be attracting less interest, with traffic down slightly in aggregate across a sampling that includes sandals.com, atlantis.com, beaches.com, and clubmed.us.

Hotels show more growth than vacation rental challengers

Many hotel websites are seeing healthy growth in web traffic, including some of the largest brands like Marriott and Hilton.

Meanwhile, the vacation rental market exemplified by Airbnb and Vrbo, which has posed a significant challenge to hotels in recent years, is seeing cooling demand.

Growth is harder to come by in travel

Overall, the travel industry has rebounded from the lows of 2020, and the general trend is upward – but rapid growth has been harder to come by lately, unless you can convince travelers you’re offering them an exceptional deal.

The Similarweb Insights & Communications team is available to pull additional or updated data on request for the news media (journalists are invited to write to press@similarweb.com). When citing our data, please reference Similarweb as the source and link back to the most relevant blog post or similarweb.com/blog/insights/.

Contact: For more information, please write to press@similarweb.com.

Report By: David F. Carr, Senior Insights Manager

Methodology

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Image by Dorothe from Pixabay

by David F. Carr

David covers social media, digital advertising, and generative AI. With a background in web trends since the 1990s, he’s also the author of "Social Collaboration for Dummies".