The TravelGround Blog

Many of you were thrilled to hear about our significant Traffic Growth over 2009, and we’re happy to anounce the the trend has continued for the first six months of 2010. If you are wondering how this scale compares to our previous enquiries graph,rest assured that the last week shown here had over double the amount of enquiries experience in our best week of 2009 (the week before Christmas).

The only hiccup in growth this year (the section circled in yellow) was due to the Seacom Cable going down. This cable carries much if the Internet Traffic between our South African users and the TravelGround Server in London, so when a section of the cable broke in the middle of the Mediterranean, we were left at the mercy of a repair ship that took almost 2 weeks to get the repair done.

Number of Enquiries Week by Week -- First 6 Months 2010

People tend to think that this magnitude of growth must be linked to the current Soccer World Cup, however most of our customers are South African’s traveling South Africa. Upon analysis of enquiries over the last six months, you can see that over 85% of our business is generated by local interest, pointing strongly towards sustainability.

So here’s hoping our next 6-monthly report is even more impressive!

TravelGround has grown in leaps and bounds since the beginning of 2009 – for more insight into our progress, read on…

From humble beginnings…

In March of 2009 we began registering accommodation establishments for our nation-wide South African accommodation website. In early August, less than 6 months later, we opened our brand-new booking service with 380 establishments. During that 1st month we had almost 3,500 pageviews. That traffic resulted in only 10 accommodation leads. Action was required!

To the present…

Today, TravelGround is growing faster than ever. Over the last 6 months we have added an additional 500 accommodation establishments and now list almost 30,000 beds in 900 accommodation establishments across South Africa.

In the month of January we had almost 90,000 page-views which represents an incredible 2500,00% increase in traffic over 6 months, but even more importantly we had over 1000 enquiries for accommodation.

For a more visual representation of our speedy growth, take a look at the graphs below:

In only 6 months our rapidly growing traffic has reached 90,000 pageviews per month, and is still growing fast.

Even after the busy peak season our number of website enquiries has continued to grow. In January, we generated over 1,000 enquiries, and we expect over 1,500 enquiries in February.

We’re excited about our growth thus far, but what really excites us is all the growth that lies ahead!