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!
I’m surprised by an overall drop in site visits. Any thought(s) as to why?
Interesting data on Flyertalk. They just changed their site and no longer have a trending posts section that was the main part of the site I visited. It likely pushed people to visit Flyertalk’s homepage directly.
@Rusty – for this site? De-prioritized by Google in the late-August core update, the reduction is all from Google
@rusty As Gary said above, it’s directly attributable to changes instituted by Google last August and September.
@Find Flights For Me – traffic should be for all pages within the site, not just the home page, I suspect it’s a Google effect (many large sites benefited from Google algorithm changes) but I do not know this for certain
Definitely not in the order of best to worst.
I hate Upgraded Points. I found it inaccurate on basic facts. The content is obviously written by some schmuck just parsing other online content of questionable quality, with possibly the exception of Jamie Larounis whose boardingarea blog I used to read (mostly for fun; he is like a 13 year old kid, so the analysis isn’t full of wisdom as it would be even by the youthful Ben Schlappig). It seems to me most authors of UP have no firsthand experience at all.
Doctor of Credit is run by two dudes who look the same so I can’t tell them apart. One dude seems chill. The other is a curt AH who doesn’t know how to communicate respectfully. Reminds me of the time I walked into a West Elm (furniture) store in Manhattan and asked the “greeter” where was online order pickup. While staring into space and not smiling at me, she said one word: “back.” I know it’s Manhattan but the culture at high end retail is still to properly greet customers with eye contact and warm smiles.
Ben Schlappig made his claim to fame in the blogosphere by posting highly relatable personal content that readers could live vicariously through. This content is now rare. Most of the new posts on his site are TPG wannabe guides for total noobs. Schlappig has always written in an extremely long winded style so it’s hard to discern his natural writing from made-for-Google writing styles.
At the end of the day I love View From The Wing. The author has the most expertise AND the most wisdom.
There should be a ranking for worst in terms of disingenuously shilling credit cards and points for cash “deals” that are not good for readers. One Mile at a Time is the worst offender, in my opinion, and Live and Let’s Fly at the other end of the spectrum hardly pushing anything at all.
I go to milesfeed to see the headlines then go from there, but avoid TPG almost all the time
I don’t understand why Live and Let’s made the list. All that guy does is writing about coffee and United and Star Alliance (so bias). He rarely mentions SkyTeam and oneworld.
So what sites do you think are the best?
congrats, Gary, for building a top-tier go-to site on your own and esp. for keeping fresh content constantly posted.
It’s an honor to do my little part to ensure your success. 🙂
Gary, I am always looking for, even expecting, a comment from Tim Dunn on VFTW. I guess he does his “little part” by being one of your top commenters. Come to think of it, who were your top 5 commenters in March 2024?
@T-His fans like looking at him and he obliges.
Love your site.
Do not like all the typos.
I know a special disorder may be involved but auto correct does have a function.
Sometimes it’s like reading how Donald Trump trying to speak a paragraph.
Our page views were up 10-15% March on March, not 45% (assuming visits were similar).
Frequent Miler changed from a system which emailed whole articles to a system which emailed links to articles. This probably accounts for the huge jump in website visits.
Lmao Timmy, your “part” is clicks, no more. Straining my thumb while scrolling past your long winded, delusional and self aggrandizing diatribes are the worst part of this and other travel blogs.
Congrats Gary. Always enjoy reading your work.
Congrats Gary! We appreciate your effort on this site.
Reading Tim Dunn’s comments drives my traffic. Love the site, though. It’s a regular refresh on my phone.
In defense of Tim Dunn, I find some of his posts add useful information. I do poke fun at the premier airline characterization from time to time because I don’t believe Delta is that, having flown on it and also flown on other domestic and Asian airlines. I do believe at least some of the criticism of Tim Dunn is a “pot calling the kettle black” situation. It is interesting to see the number of straw man arguments floated on this website.
I used to love TPG when BK was in charged. He used to post new news all day along, Now The new TPG team are the worst of the worst, I will like to see the whole team fired. I miss Brian K.
On the Miles to Memories podcast they talked abotutthe Gogle changes I think in the most recent episode. They said some smaller sites were completely crushed by the google changes and lost a huge part of their traffic. Some may have to fold or make changes. None of course on this list.
@JCW I can’t even read VFTW on my phone — all the intrusive ads make the site completely unreadable. It’s frustrating. I only read VFTW on my laptop/monitor where the ads don’t take over the entire experience, although they do remain overly intrusive compared to other sites in general.
@Gary — You are the only one enriched by all the ads. Can you please cut back on the ads to improve overall readership experience?
I think Frequent MIler improved as their podcast and Youtube is getting more traffic. SO they have worked hard. This blog I have always loved. I have not seen Gary in person in many yrs but he was lways always funny and interesting at the meetups. I think Reddit has really hurt the core of Flyertalk. The reason is the award and credit card subreddits are completely huge and Flyertalk forums feel like 1990. Reddit gets so much traffic that it works as a much better funnel thann Flyertalk. I read View from the Wing the most, I listen to Frequent miler podcast and on the website occasionally. One MIle I look to for some flight reviews. Flyertalk I used to check on some program changes and hotels. Now its much easier for me to see the hotel details and tons of current infomration on Reddit. The Hyatt board and marriott are so active. They probably get 10-20X or more psots than Flyertalk on hotels. Doctor of Credit I go alot for various bank and brokers information/promos. Rarely much on airlines and sometimes for credit card talk.
@Dougie, I don’t know, I don’t have a great way of tracking that tbh – a big manual lift!
Flyertalk got rid of the trending page stuff and has instead got in line to instead peddle “new posts” for the day. I assume the shift and related SEO focus has to do with the site administrators/owners not being happy about the profitability level of the site. It is basically owned by a private equity type group that needs to get a payout for its expensive purchase of IB on top of whatever IB had purchased at a premium.
Since IB seems unwilling to commit to continuing to splurge on hosting Moderator Dos in the way it has done until last year, and since an IB Admin on the site decided to disclose his hourly pay calculation on the site after earlier having told people that Flyertalk isn’t as big a money-maker for IB as they may have assumed, it seems to me like they need the increase in traffic and more in order to try to make the finance folks happy since there are a lot of gripes about money from and for the site. I do wonder how much ad-blocking software is adversely-impacting the site. Those user numbers seem to suggest that maybe turning off and suspending and even banning high-post-count non-moderator contributors is good for business. The site seems to have eased up a tiny bit on its attempt to so widely block VPNs.
Live and Let Fly and The Gate.ate the only 2 I follow religiously at this point. Little to no politics, always interesting, never pushing links to line their pockets with money and very well written. I take a quick look when the headline intrigues me, such as this one, but that is rare to be honest.
Frequent Miler is the only one on the list above that I consider a “must visit” for what is going on with deals or getting value out of the hotel and airline program points.
And then there are the aviation related message boards (and have large sections for commercial airlines) which tend to be more reactive to individual interests (and questions)
flyertalk (dot) com
australianfrequentflyer (dot) com (dot) au
Of the published list above VFTW is my most visited.
Unless the site has volunteered to share its data with Similarweb this data isn’t very reliable.
That Upgd Points site isn’t value add to me.
Frequent Miler probably has the most engaged actual reader base and community. Regularly angles you can use crop up there.
Gary is the WSJ of the space – breaking news and views and i’m regularly here to comment.
Gary,
every day, I tend to visit your site, Ben’s site, Flyer Talk and Loyalty Lobby. Truth be told, I might check back two to three times a day in case there is a crazy good premium fair deal reported 😉
I love Gary’s site and all the others except for TPG. The reason I don’t go to TPG is because there’s no comment section and half the time I learn something new in the comment section.
TPG used to have a comments section, IIRC. By going too far down the road of being credit card pushers, killing off comments and becoming “mainstream” to the point of being useless for me, TPG lost my interest. Audience engagement matters, and that engagement by the site’s copy producers seems to reap dividends along with providing useful or entertaining content from or between audience members.
I like LoyaltyLobby.com a lot, but the Disqus comment requirement to engage with the site may be a factor in it not getting as much audience participation as its content deserves. Also, that site was under some kind of DDOS attacks for a bit and who knows how that could hurt that site’s numbers.
Part of the click bait process is to only list a limited number of articles (3 to 4) per page . Therefore, the reader hits the “read more” button which counts as an “additional click” and makes your numbers look better.
@GUWonder – the change to comments wasn’t in the last year, and comments don’t seem to matter much in a material way for traffic in any case, I suspect that the drop is entirely due to Google changes
I agree on that. But sometimes it takes a while for a population’s old habits to kick the can even after arguably user-unfriendly changes are made and interactive audience engagement gets on a path to be curtailed.
I think some of the people who make their money from travel and miles and points-related material would benefit more financially from paying attention to where Amex increasingly derives its profit increases — that is the “affluent young” — in high income countries and consider how and what appeals to a demographic group that is going to be around far longer than the average 40+ year old man or woman from whose heart is increasingly damaged by fossil-fuel-related pollution of various sorts (including microplastic pollution via the water and food supplies).
@Gary – You included your site in the list. Do you have analytics setup on this site and do the numbers match?
@Christopher – they’re close enough
I’m really happy to see the growth for Frequent Miler. To me, they’re the one site that seems to have a mission centered around helping every day people travel better. Their challenges are fun to watch and follow. Greg and Nick also seem like really nice and trustworthy guys.
VFTW, LALF, and OMAAT are my daily entertainment. I appreciate all of them. Ben is the king of the bloggers, and LALF feels like a community. Considering how much time I spend reading the 4 cited above, I’m surprised the other 10 get so much traffic.
What’s impressive is how much of the above traffic in the space is a product of infrastructure and support initially established by Randy Petersen.
Frequent Miler is great, and it works for me even as someone who tries to stick to reading content rather than watching and listening to video, audio and audio-video material in the space.
Thanks for this data Gary.
Frequent Miler is indeed a juggernaut of an outlier here. Very well deserved, for many reasons.