The Q1 2025 benchmarking report for airlines has just been published. Learn how the top 12 airlines perform across the digital space.

The latest Q1 2025 benchmarking report for airlines has just been published. It covers the largest 12 airlines, including Virgin Atlantic, EasyJet, British Airways, Delta Air Lines, Jet2.com and Jet2 Holidays, Ryanair, Aer Lingus, Air France, Wizz Air, United Airlines, Alaska Airlines, and American Airlines.

The research gives an inside track on who is winning the biggest share of voice online, and quantifies the gaps, risks and missed opportunities for other airlines to win brand exposure, drive online enquiries, and generate flight bookings. The report highlights year-on-year digital performance, plus winner and loser comparisons across 20+ online performance metrics and quantifies the gaps, risks and missed opportunities for airlines to win brand exposure, online growth and sales.

To see a preview and contents page of the Q1 report, click here. To get a copy of the full report and the key takeaways, please complete the enquiry form or schedule a call.

Q1 2025 WINNERS LEADERBOARD

For a glance into just 6 of the metrics, we evaluated these top 12 airlines on, check out our quick-look table below;

Continue reading for further detail on this quarter's best and poorest-performing airlines or request a copy of the report for the full review.

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What The Industry Research Report Covers

The 70+ pages of research benchmarks each retailer based on 50+ metrics and indicators of successful digital strategy, including organic visibility, domain authority, paid media ads, conversion performance, technical performance, site speed, universal search, content, social ads, accessibility, and mobile performance.  

Driving Optimal ROAS from Paid Media Channels

Some of the leading players in the space are high spenders on paid media channels such as Google, Bing & Facebook - but have a poor or sub-optimal conversion improvement strategy. Without an optimised, sophisticated conversion strategy that maximises the conversion rate, the return on investment is unsustainable or will underperform. Scaling spend on paid media is not achievable unless the conversion rate delivers optimal performance in the sector. Some in the space have paid media spend levels from 30k+ per month but dedicate minimal resources and budgets to conversion testing.  Given the cost per clicks on ad networks will continue to rise, we recommend spending at least 10% of your paid media budget on ongoing conversion optimisation testing schedules to ensure your paid media ROI maintains long-term viability, competitive advantage, and sustainability.

Pay-Per-Click Marketing

Pay-Per-Click marketing is constantly evolving, with more and more advertisers being forced to hand over a lot of control to Google's algorithms as the push for automation grows ever stronger. There are still key elements of control that we have though, the main one of these being budget which is ultimately something the algorithms can't take from you. That's why being smart with your budget and ad coverage is essential to achieving strong results and bettering what your competitors have to offer.

For Q1 2025, the average monthly budget wastage across these airlines was £65,310, with some of the top players in the market spending a considerable amount on areas and audiences unlikely to deliver a return. We can see this in more detail when looking at the average monthly cost per cost-per-click (CPC) amongst advertisers, with the average of this metric being £3.6 . This highlights how competitive the market is and how important it is to control your budgets effectively. 

There are varying monthly ad budgets across the competitors in the report. While this gap highlights the competitive advantage that larger budgets can provide, it's not just about spending more; it’s about spending smarter. By focusing on driving efficiency in campaign management, targeting, and budget allocation, businesses with smaller budgets can still effectively compete with larger players. Investing in data-driven strategies and refining ad performance can help close the gap and maximise the return on every pound spent, enabling growth even in a competitive landscape. Relative to their spend, Aer Lingus, Jet2.com and Virgin Atlantic have the lowest monthly cost-per-click (CPC) at £1, and United Airlines has the highest at £10.

The report highlights the importance of budget efficiency by comparing monthly ad spend with estimated CPC in relation to your competitors, see who has the highest and lowest CPC. To maximise the effectiveness of your budget, it’s essential to focus on driving CPC down while maintaining or improving campaign performance.

In this report, British Airways has the highest estimate monthly ad spend at £2,350,000, and Alaska Airlines has the lowest at £82. By optimising targeting, refining ad copy, and leveraging data to identify high-converting opportunities, you can ensure every click delivers maximum value. This approach not only stretches your budget further but also boosts your return on ad spend (ROAS), enabling you to achieve stronger results without simply increasing expenditure.

Technical Website Compliance

Savvy digital marketers know that having a technically sound website is an essential component of a successful fully integrated digital strategy - plus a site capable of maximising conversion performance. 

Though airlines have the benefits of not needing to maintain a large range of products (which sites usually trip up on when it comes to technical compliance), they will need to present a large amount of information to both prospective and existing customers. They'll therefore want to ensure that key information such as routes, customer service details, and airline policies are easy to find, clear to read, and not hidden behind broken links and 404 error codes.

Wizz Air reported 127 4xx errors — the highest of all airlines. Brands should look for guest-blogging opportunities to increase their outreach and backlinks

Site Speed & Conversion Rate Performance

When  62% of consumers are less likely to convert if they have a negative mobile site experience, ensuring that your site is quick and easy to load makes a significant improvement on your overall conversion rates. 

The overall mobile site speed for this quarter ranged between 63 and 3, with Delta Air Lines reporting the lowest site speed and Wizz Air reporting the fastest mobile speed. All brands should aim for at least a 50% mobile site speed, and small actions can make a big difference, such as update to a mobile-friendly theme, simplifying the navigation system and increasing text size to cater to smaller devices.

Building Competitive Advantage with Domain Authority

Domain authority is an essential metric for measuring the effectiveness of SEO performance, and helps create a reliable overall gauge of how effective your site is at achieving organic traffic, i.e. ‘free’ traffic that isn’t gained through sponsored ads. Airlines could look to collaborate with, and outreach to, local & national publications, and travel sites, in order to build their backlink profile, as well as improve referral traffic.

A ‘good’ DA really comes down to how your competitors are performing, however it’s generally considered average between 40 and 50, good between 50 and 60, and excellent above 60. The DA score ranged between 87 and 54, with American Airlines flagging the lowest DA score. This airline should adopt a PR strategy to improve their relationship with authority websites with a similar target audience to help increase the quality and number of their backlinks.

Organic Performance – Mobile & Desktop

A strong organic performance is strategically important as it ensures your site ranks above competitors for key, transactional keywords. When 93% of your customers won’t go past the first page of Google, your absence or lack of targeting for essential keywords will cost you conversions. Though you may expect traffic across the travel sector to shrink, in response to the cost of living crisis, we've found all holiday sectors we specialise in have grown over the past 12 months. This could be down to consumers forgoing day to day treats in order to prioritise a holiday, or from customers heading straight to airline and provider websites in search of a cheaper deal from booking directly.

Only two airlines saw a decrease in organic traffic on desktop, while eight reported a decrease on mobile. With this data in mind, airlines should keep in mind that their website is mobile-friendly to encourage visitors to access their website from a mobile.

Universal Search Opportunity

Google Universal Search Results is an evolving opportunity to make your pages visible on a SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Universal results often appear before traditional listings and are eye-catching for users. Universal search results refer to rankings on a SERP that are not the traditional ‘blue line’ Google link, and a retailer can appear for universal search results without being strong in standard rankings. 'Reviews' and 'people also ask' results are a great opportunity for airlines to improve trust, and answer key questions, without users even needing to (initially) leave the SERP.

British Airways secured the most overall Universal Search appearances (172,936), with the majority of these coming from ‘images’ (99,000). Securing plentiful Universal Search results can strengthen a brand’s credibility and authority, helping to improve users’ perception of them.

The Longtail Keyword Opportunity

Longtail keywords are often considered high intent and potentially more likely to convert as a searcher is being more specific. Optimising for longtail keywords also puts your content strategy in a strong position to rank for retailer new search terms as they enter Google’s index. Airlines should take particular care to optimise for longtail keywords including high conversion-intent phrases, such as 'last minute flight New York' or 'fly to Boston via Dublin'.

EasyJet secured the most longtail keyword appearances for position 3 (34,257) and positions 4–10 (83,292). Longtail keywords often target evergreen content, helping you maintain a steady flow of traffic in the long term.

Facebook Adverts

With the number of Facebook users in the United Kingdom (UK) hitting over 44 million users in 2023, it is not surprising that companies have jumped at the opportunity to advertise on the social media platform. Facebook’s UK digital advertising revenue has been estimated to have breached 2.6b GB pounds in 2019.

We’ve included examples of American Airline’s sponsored posts. This airline included vertical images to cater to mobile users and used short sentences and a maximum of two lines of text to help attract users’ attention as they’re scrolling their social media feed.

Top Social Shares & Content

When it comes to social media and on-site content strategies, it is important to release content that has a longer shelf life. An article is considered 'Evergreen' if it has maintained its relevancy to an audience for longer. It's great for your retailer engagement, but great for Google too, who will recognise content which achieves traffic over a long period of time. Airlines can create content based on flying, general travel information, or even about popular destinations that are likely to grab attention from social media users.

Air France has the most Facebook Likes (7.2 million), while Ryanair has the most Instagram followers (1.6 million). Brands can increase their social media engagement by running contests or giveaways with rules that encourage interaction (e.g., like, share or tag).

Website Readability & Accessibility

20% of people in the UK have a disability – 2 million of which are people living with sight loss. In addition, 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women have some degree of colour vision deficiency. When websites are not designed to meet these needs, retailers lose customer interest as they turn elsewhere. Airlines must be accessible for all, as poor digital accessibility on their sites may suggest to users that their flights themselves may be an uncomfortable experience.

EasyJet flagged 57 accessibility alerts — the highest of all airlines. EasyJet also reported 78 contrast errors — the highest of all airlines. It’s important to reduce these alerts and errors to ensure the web experience isn’t compromised for those with a colour vision deficiency, an attention disorder and more. A fully accessible website also communicates to search engines that the website is trustworthy.

GET THE FULL 70-PAGE Q1 2025 REPORT

To get a copy of the full report, please complete the enquiry form. If you want to talk to us about accelerating your digital performance, please call us on 01543 410014 or schedule a call with Mike Movassaghi.

Photo by JAVIER SEPULVEDA PASCUAL on Unsplash