MORE reviews posted as the search continues for Australia’s best travel website, which will be announced at TRAVELtech on September 8 . The hunt has started with the Hitwise Hottest 100, five score of Australia’s most popular websites. Check out the early reviews and have your say. Nominate a site you think should be considered. The best 25 or thirty will be chosen and posted for voting, the results considered by a panel of autonomous judges to determine Website of the Year and the Top Ten Travel Websites.
#65 Mount Hotham: Good snow resort site that gets marks for effort. This year it has launched a community page where people can download images and video. It’s a start! It has a simple splash page, good use of images, all key information easy to find. Site does what it’s supposed to with some style and innvoation.
#63 Hotel.com.au: A decent site that does a god job at selling rooms. Home page features dozens of destination links that clearly help with SEO but don’t do much for aesthetics. There are quite a few bells and whistles including a blog that is updated regularly. Product comes through HotelClub. While on site was asked to complete a pop-up survey that left me a little confused about its purpose.
#?? Clean Cruising: Really good looking site. Blue and white, lots of great search filters, innovative use of maps, easy to navigate. A lot of thought has clearly gone into this site which unfortunately is unable to offer a live booking facility, no doubt a reflection of the lack of IT savvy among cruise lines..
#60 Rydges.com: A busy site dominated by a large central ad, which can be a little distracting although the counter-argument would be that it’s there to sell the latest specials, which it dopes quite well. Booking functionality adequate although confusing at times as there is no single entry point and product display can vary according to which link is clicked.
#93 Rent-A-Home.com.au: An attractive, inviting site. Simple to use and clearly laid out, features consumer reviews and a decent booking engine. Does what it sets out to do – rent holiday homes. It looks authoritative and provides a rental guarantee with every booking.
#29 Airfares Flights: Great search engine visibility and vies with Webjet for #1 slot in many of the key airfare/airline categories. The business model is link-based and allows consumers to search airfares across most major Australian online travel agencies. Not the slickest site but effective.
#2 Qantas: New site, think it has just been launched, very sharp. Sexy look and feel, innovative yet straight forward navigation: very easy to get around. Airfares are just the start of what it’s selling – everything to do with travel can be booked on the site – yet it doesn’t feel cluttered. All options are clearly presented and there’s smart use of images. It’s a great improvement over the previous incarnation and what you want from one of Australia’s most important websites. www.qantas.com.au
#19 ExplorOz: Interesting site, simple well laid-out and with lots of depth. Busy member forums with plenty of contributions every day, plus comprehensive classified marketplace. Site perfectly pitched to its audience – people travelling around Oz. Very popular and can see why. www.exploroz.com
#18 HotelClub: One of Australia’s most popular accommodation sites features a functional design that hasn’t changed for years but it grows on you as ease of use becomes apparent. Good property display that uses full width of page and features links to all the stuff needed to make a decision on where to stay, including user reviews. www.hotelclub.com.au
#74 My Fun: A theme park aggregator. “The official site website to purchase discounted tickets to all of your favourite theme parks and attractions.” A simple, direct site that does its job very well, which is to sell theme park tickets. www.myfun.com.au
#86 Hertz: Like most car hire supplier sites, this is basically a booking engine. There’s no embellishment, no pretence, no ambition. There’s not a single picture on the splash page though some illustration through cartoonish car doodles that feature in a couple of promos. Yellow and black dominate. www.hertz.com.au
#?? Avis: Didn’t make into the Hitwise Hottest 100 but best-looking of the car hire supplier sites. Home page even features a photo of a car speeding down the highway. Revolutionary! Big special offers – focus on rate in large numerals. Four step booking process but no price display when car rental options presented. www.avis.com.au
#64 Travelmate: This site looks very familiar, just like the last time I visited, in fact, which would have been two or three years ago. No photos or drama of any kind on the home page. After starting life as an Aussie drive tourism site from Caltex, it’s now owned by AOT and is basically an accommodation booking engine with a few add-ons. www.travelmate.com.au
#45 About Australia: A big fat linking site with lots of pages and info – great for SEO – but can be hard to find the good stuff. Uses the Roamfree booking engine plus paid links for accommodation, tours etc. General look and feel – orange the primary colour – screams advertising. All prime positions, including masthead, taken out by ads while Google AdWords runs on most pages. www.about-australia.com
#26 Australian Explorer: Another big linking site focussing on destination information and high search engine rankings. Not really a lot of difference between it and About Australia. You’ve got to click a lot to get anywhere. Google AdWords is very prominent once again and, while it may drive revenue, doesn’t look so hot. www.australianexplorer.com
#23 Singapore Airlines: Nice look and feel. Calming colours and design, much less garish that some of the competition. Nice branding through use of Singapore Girl image. But ultimately a limited website that only provides air bookings. For example, unlike other carriers, there are no holidays, hotel or car booking options. Strangely on the navigation bar ‘SIA Holidays’ is listed under ‘Promotions’, which links through to a separate website for Tradewinds Tours. Huh? www.singaporeair.com
#82 Please Take Me To: This website has lots of great content (Australia’s largest collection of travel photos, videos etc) but is let down by a site design that has no sense of direction. Is it a photo site? Is it a video site? Or just another destination site packed with links? Right now it is option 3. I have a nagging feeling it looked a whole lot better when launched a couple of years ago but has since changed focus. www.pleasetakemeto.com
More reviews will be posted soon. Add yours below – be nice now!
I vote takeabreak.com.au as Number 1 travel website
I was wondering if you are having different categories as well as an overall award to give the newer, emerging, boutique sites etc. a chance and getting some recognition.
Just some suggestions if I may would be, best emerging site, best new site, best new concept, best innovation, best regional tourism site to name a few and each category winner would be in the running for best overall website award.
Not sure how much of this you are already doing but thought I’d throw in my 10 cents worth.
Not this year Gary, just Website of the Year and Top Ten Websites.
Can we at least get our site, Ubid4rooms.com nominated as we cover most of your criteria very well, including usuability, speed/functionality, design and apearance.
We have also been designed by industry professionals taking both suppliers and consumers into account, making the site simple to use for consumer and offer no hassle administration for suppliers.
While not in the top 100 sites yet, we have been very well received and accepted by the market, have had possibly the most media interest in any new site and are a site that finally offers a unique and innovative distribution tool for all size properties in very tough times.
Thanks for your suggestion but I’m covered on the judging front, using a points system and three experienced, autonomous judges.
I’m not sure how Pam can justify saying Take A Break is the No.1 web site, as I tried to use it to find some information on Tasmania and all I got was accommodation listings and no other useful information.
Martin – seeing that no websites from Tasmania made the HitWise Top 100 (which is fair enough, given the state’s small size), can you please get hold of and publish the top 200 (instead of 100) travel sites so that way travel sites covering smaller markets like Tasmania, Western Australia, Northern Territory, etc, will make the list? As the current list is swamped with airlines, public transport sites, mapping sites, etc.
Hottest 100 is just a starting point. Criteria is usuability, speed/functionality, design and apearance, interactivity and use of social media, popularity. Let us know any sites you think worthy of consideration.
Jamie, TakeABreak does offer information on places to travel to, events and so forth, there are links from every page 🙂
What’s the point in glorifying the major travel companies who have unlimited budgets. And just because it gets the most hits, doesn’t make it a good site. I agree with Gary – you should be encouraging the boutique sites and smaller travel companies. We’ve spent a lot of time developing our site with a very limited budget – and I think it looks pretty good (www.inspiredtravel.com.au) – but we’ll never make the HitWise Top 100!
The Hottest 100 is a starting point. Consider your site nominated.
Whereis is the original and the best mapping site, with fantastic aerial photography, the same content that is in your Navman etc. you can see wotif accommodation with a click of a button. Easilly find out how close your accommodation really is to the beach, airport, shops! I can’t beleive a US site like google maps would be considered ahead of a local web pioneer. Just like Qantas being called an essential Australian site, these guys were doing it well before the global monster arrived on our shores. They are also linked with another site, Citysearch. What better way to see what’s on when you are visting another city. I have been lucky enough to travel with work and often land in a city wondering how to fill in my time. Pleased to say Citysearch has let me know about great theatre, free events and simple things like what movies are on nearby. The recent addition of mobile sites makes these two sites essential parts of Australian travel
I’m interested to know how the judges will decide whether the Hottest 100 are ‘Australian’.
In my opinion, sites like Hertz, Avis and Singapore Airlines shouldn’t make this list, as they’re all based on global Web templates, with little or no development within Australia.
The others on the list (and probably those yet to be announced) are truly Australian, and deserve to be recognised.
Fair point, will take that into consideration.
Ultimate Hides is a website directory of designer accommodation both in Australia and overseas. Regarding eligibility for this competition – the site has been designed and set up here in Australia, and the office is based in Sydney. Also the majority of our properties are in Australia at present, and we hope to add many more!
The concept is a collection of holiday properties that encompass contemporary architectural design, sustainability, privacy, inspirational surrounds and the ultimate escape, whilst also giving credit to the architects, designers and artists involved in their creation, the aim of which is to promote great architecture and design through first hand experience.
Hi Martin,
as most people are saying to recognise the small businesses trying their best to compete and promote Australia against the big boys please take a look at takeabreak.com.au. We are a small family owned business that is multi state and national award winning boutique website that highly promotes the smaller operator especially in regional Australia, the webiste is very functional and user friendly and is supported by a 225,000+ subscriber base holiday inspiration newsletter with superbly presented articles and tips for holiday makers and we also have a strong presence on Facebook and have just started twittering, also hitwise top 10 for over 2 years.
An Australian website for your consideration: holidayspecialpackages.com.au
We are an Australian owned and run company specialising in holiday packages catering essentially to the domestic market.
I would also invite your readers to look at our affiliate system.
Hotels Combined is a complete resource of Hotels in Australia, designed for easy browsing, and side by side comparisons of facilities and rates. I use it, and would recommend it.
Flight Centre’s site is hardly useful to travelers. It’s just an inquiry machine…their deals have little to no information about them in an effort to get a very weak inquiry and some contact details.
We run a niche round the world online agency, roundabouttravel.com.au. Tough to get in a list that’s purely judged on hits though. Would love to see a panel judged competition with various categories.
As this is sponsered by Hitwise, no doubt some boring corporate site will win. If the criteria is traffic volume, that would be a cop out.
As a runner up I would nominate the Stella Resorts website which was redesigned by Isn’t Media a year or so ago. I think it’s really nice and usable. A great job for a medium sized QLD agency.
But the winner is clearly Hotels Combined. The technology and usability of this site is amazing. They also have an innovative affiliate platform and are no doubt powering some big brands from a stealth position. I recently used used the site “as a user” to book hotels on my recent holiday to Europe and it was da bomb.
Another small QLD agency doing some beautiful independent hotel websites is Pebble Design. They have a huge portfolio of Australian hotel sites. They recently launched the new Sofitel sites which look GREAT. They also did the Lake Crackenback and Westin websites.
All 3 are worth a look, just for the precision and clarity of the front end design.
They lack slightly in the technology / programming department however which limits their project scope.
Great new Qanatas web site easy to use and has all the information required. Good work QF.
I’d appreciate for my site, frequentflyer.com.au to be considered. Our Forum is, as far as I know, Australia’s largest online travel community with a friendly and helpful member base.
There are close to 200,000 posts on topics tanging from how best to use frequent flyer programs to general travel tips and trip reports.
I’m interested to understand how sites such as Queensland Transport (which is the QLD Goverment website for licensing & registration) could be categorised under Travel? There’s a few other examples in the list as well. If this is geniunely a search for the hottest 100 travel websites, perhaps the categorisation might need to reassessed to ensure that what is listed is really Travel related? Just a thought.
Fair point. I’ll pass this onto Hitwise. Note that the Hottest 100 is only a starting point.
Our travel gear ecommerce website (traveluniverse.com.au) is unique in the Aust market – currently over 1750 travel products in stock, and it has been designed to work with industry partners to power their own online travel shops.
I’ve been with the TakeAbreak website for three years now and am very happy with the way they present my cottage in Broken Hill to clients, are always there with support when needed, and when we wander off to somewhere else for a weekend, I can always find what I need as their site is easy to use. Big tick for them!!
I like HotelClub for their clean and simple design and especially their search result page layout.