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The Most Visited Frequent Flyer & Travel Sites (Results For #1, 7, and 9 Will Surprise You) – View from the Wing

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The Most Visited Frequent Flyer & Travel Sites (Results For #1, 7, and 9 Will Surprise You) – View from the Wing

The Most Visited Frequent Flyer & Travel Sites (Results For #1, 7, and 9 Will Surprise You)

by Gary Leff

A year ago I looked at the frequent flyer and travel sites getting the most traffic. I noted that ‘most frequently visited’ isn’t the same as best, and many of you had strong opinions on that!

In fact, I agree with you: this list in order isn’t close to my own list of best sites, but for those curious about a best estimate of who sees the most traffic here’s a list that ranks 14 popular websites.

Some caveats:

  • Data is from SimilarWeb, which I think does a good job with estimates overall but is going to be wrong in some cases, perhaps even wildly at times, but is still useful for order-of-magnitude.
  • This is looking just at March 2024 data – the most recent month available. I compare it to March 2023 data, which I posted last year. March may have been a good or bad month for any given site this year, just as it may have been last year – these are just two data points.
  • I picked a handful of sites, if you feel others should be on here or compared you can look them up yourselves without an account.

With those limitations out of the way, here are 14 sites I checked, and SimilarWeb’s March 2024 site visit estimates:

Website March 2024 March 2023 Change
The Points Guy     11,900,000      13,100,000 -9%
View From The Wing       5,100,000        6,500,000 -22%
Dan’s Deals       5,100,000        5,500,000 -7%
Doctor of Credit       5,000,000        5,200,000 -4%
FlyerTalk       4,400,000        2,800,000 57%
One Mile at a Time       4,100,000        5,200,000 -21%
Upgraded Points       2,800,000        5,600,000 -50%
Thrifty Traveler       2,100,000        2,600,000 -19%
Frequent Miler       1,700,000           853,000 99%
Head For Points       1,600,000        1,100,000 45%
Paddle Your Own Kanoo       1,300,000        2,100,000 -38%
Live and Let’s Fly       1,300,000        1,200,000 8%
Nomadic Matt       1,100,000        1,500,000 -27%
Loyalty Lobby          884,200        1,200,000 -26%

One thing that should jump out at you is the number of websites receiving less traffic – sometimes substantially less!

Google made major changes, and its August core update followed by September Helpful Content Update hit hard. The March 2024 update did a further number on many sites. Overall Google now privileges the biggest brands and Reddit far more in its results.

That was a boon to Reddit right before going public! And I’m sure it was totally a coincidence that Reddit entered into an agreement with Google to allow its data to train Google’s AI. Google of course is also trying to answer more queries through AI when you search.

I can only guess that this explains a drop in traffic for The Points Guy (#1) and the absolutely huge drop for Upgraded Points (#7) which always seemed written mostly for Google. I’m incredibly impressed by the growth here for Frequent Miler (#9).

I’d say anyone on this list, writing for themselves or as a group of 3 or 4 people, is really impressive. Of these, I’d say that my must-reads are One Mile at Time, Frequent Miler, and Live and Let’s Fly though I scan the headlines of just about every site reporting anything related to miles, points and travel and I’ll click through anything that seems like it’s something I should know or be aware of.

And if anyone knows better publicly-available data than SimilarWeb, I’d certainly be curious!

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