Travel and jobs the future for dotcoms

The future for dotcoms may lie in the travel and job hunting industry after a report from researcher NetValue showed visits to these sites increasing dramatically throughout January.

The research found that travel sites in the UK attracted 3.7m hits in January, up from 3m in December, while 1.3m UK users were scouring jobsites, in relation to the 746,000 looking in December.

Although this would be a typical post-Christmas pattern, NetValue said the figures indicated people were starting to use more online resources. Spokesman Alki Manias said: "In January, people book their summer holidays and look into changing jobs. But this year we are seeing people doing these things online."

He said the figures tallied up to show that 33 per cent of UK users went to a travel site in January, and 12 per cent went job-hunting online.

Manias said that Lastminute.com held on to top position in the travel rankings, with 5.5 per cent of UK users visiting the site in January. Easyjet.com and Britishairways.com took second and third positions respectively, with Thomascook.com the fourth most popular site. Ebookers.com was the most popular site in terms of duration, with visitors staying on the site for an average of 17 minutes.

Online job hunting was a major boom area, with visits to recruitment sites jumping up by 74 per cent between December and January. Monster.co.uk took the lead with 288,790 unique visitors, followed closely by Fish4jobs.co.uk.

Reed.co.uk held visitor attention for the longest, with users staying an average of 9.2 minutes.

Three quarters of visitors to job sites turned out to be male, with 61 per cent aged between 15 and 34; only 6.4 per cent of visitors are over 50. One in five visitors looking for jobs online are professionals, 10 per cent are middle management and 26 per cent per cent are students.