Whilst carrying out our January monthly reports, we spotted something strange in assessing the number of visitors to our clients’ websites. All of our travel clients, without exception, had doubled the number of visitors to their website from last month. When discussing the anomaly in our reporting meeting, at the end of the month, we all had different reasons for what we believed the cause to be. Someone mentioned that it could be a result of the new Google Caffeine update, while another person pondered whether it could be down to our HubPages account suddenly producing follow links.

I had a different theory; December’s traditionally been a slow month for the travel industry, with Christmas taking up most people’s surplus cash and, therefore, most travel agents report on a decline in sales during this period. However, whilst this theory answered the question on why the December visitor numbers were significantly lower, it didn’t really explain why the visitor numbers in January were so high - they’d certainly been much higher than anything that we’d reported on for a while at our travel marketing agency.    I decided to carry out some research and see if there was any reason why more people had visited travel websites in January. Looking back over the past month, one thing that struck me as slightly out of the ordinary was the level of snow.

People up and down the country were unable to reach their place of employment because of this snow and this resulted in a large number of people working from home, or simply taking days off work. It even affected a few of the staff here at our travel marketing agency, who were unable to come in due to the severe delays in public transport.  I wondered whether the bout of cold weather could have affected the travel industry. With more people away from their desks and Christmas finally over and done with, it certainly seemed as good a time as any to start researching that foreign holiday. In fact, ABTA, the governing body of British Travel Agents, welcomed the cold weather with open arms, telling readers of Travel Weekly that the reason the British are such a nation of travellers is because of the appalling weather in our own country. So, was it last month’s snowfall that increased the number of visitors to our client’s websites? Trevor Davis from Co-Operative Travel certainly seems to think so. During the snow days in January his company saw a 20% rise in online sales, and the seven days following the big freeze were the company’s most successful yet. So it seems that whilst the snow was bad for businesses, it was nothing but good news for those in travel industry. Although it also seems that the tourism sector wasn’t alone in benefiting from snap of cold weather. Sales of cat litter went up by 55%, as consumers struggled to de-ice their own driveways and extra-marital dating site, Illicit Encounters, saw a huge surge in memberships from some of Britain’s worst hit areas.