I noticed right after Christmas an increase in traffic on the web site. Last January we also experienced a big increase. The traffic to SlowTrav has been increasing every month last year until 9/11. Between Thanksgiving and Christmas it dropped off even more. But our traffic is back and is about 1 1/2 times more than our August levels.

We had 45,000 page views on the message board for January. That is about 1500 per day. Previously our high was 1000 per day. (This does not equate to 1500 visitors to the message board per day, because each person looks at more than one page on the message board.) Nothing like the levels of the AOL or Fodors boards, but very respectable still!

During November and December we only had a few new members on the message board, but since Christmas we are getting new members every day.

Here are our SlowTrav web site stats for January. This is for the whole web site (message board and web site combined):

Total Visitors 32,314
Total Pageviews 178,085
Total Hits 464,152
Total Bytes Transferred 3.413GB

Average Visitors Per Day 1,042
Average Pageviews Per Day 5,744
Average Hits Per Day 14,972
Average Bytes Transferred Per Day 112.7MB

Average Pageviews Per Visitor 5
Average Hits Per Visitor 14
Average Bytes Per Visitor 113,395
Average Length of Visit 397sec

So lets give ourselves a big pat on the back for doing such a great job!

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Kim,

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Originally posted by Pauline:
I noticed right after Christmas an increase in traffic on the web site.

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I actually had traffic issues yesterday. Three times I got a message that it was too busy and try again later - just waited a second then clicked the mouse again and it worked.

A big pat on the back to YOU, Pauline! You do a great job.

For travel in general, we've noticed a big upswing in just the last two weeks...and thank goodness for it! Our agency has been lucky in that our corporate travel department has helped to hold up the leisure side since September 11th, but even so, the agency income has been down well over 50%. And we've been one of the lucky ones.

Kim, was that going onto the message board or the web site? Must have been the message board. That is not good! Currently I use Mindspring/Earthlink as my web host, but plan to change within the next month. Maybe things will be better then. Meanwhile, everyone let me know if this happens to you. slowtrav@mindspring.com

Thanks Sally! I have heard from some vacation rental agencies that things are picking up now. They are complaining here in Hawaii that the vacancy rate is much higher than usual, but it turns out it is usually 70 percent and is now 60 percent. Not such a dramatic drop and they say last year was a banner year, so they are comparing it to that. You still have to wait in line for Brenneckes!

Pauline, I have seen this site mentioned on the newsgroup rec.travel.europe several times in the past few months. For each person who posts asking for info that someone thinks they might find here, there must be thousands who lurk, see and never post. Add to that hits from google or other search engines, and you're off!