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Best of Langkawi Celebrates One Million Hits This Year

The popular website Best-of-Langkawi.com today celebrates reaching a record traffic figure of one million hits during 2005.
The site was launched last year is operated by local Langkawi company TOP-Lah Promotion, whose chairman Bill Gee said, "We are really proud of this fantastic response to Langkawi. When we started there was not enough information about the island online, now with more than 600 pages of Langkawi information we are seeing almost 10,000 hits a day".
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN
"Most of these visitors are from countries around the world. They are either researching where to go on their next holiday, or have already decided to visit Langkawi and are returning repeatedly to the website to plan their visit.
"There are researching hotels, restaurants, shops, tours, beaches, places to go, things to do, places to visit. We have almost 500 articles about Langkawi online already and that figure is growing rapidly, and visitors are reading them. We have many Langkawi hotels, restaurants, shops and other businesses featured on the site and those pages are also being visited.
WHEN WILL THEY COME?
"There is a great deal of variation between countries. Americans and Europeans have annual holidays and they tend to start planning up to eight months before travelling. Their average arrival times are around four months after visitor numbers from that country peak.
"For Asian countries the cycle is much shorter. Japanese and Singapore travellers often go online just 2 - 6 weeks before travelling, while with Singapore and Malaysian travellers this period is even shorter.
"There is a delay period which varies from country to country. For example Scandinavians are not looking now as they are preparing for their summer. Every year we see a sudden spike when thousands, even tens of thousands of Scandinavians hit travel websites simultaneously - it coincides exactly with the first real cold snap at the end of their summer - normally during August or September. We watched their weather reports online and brought in extra staff when the forecasts were cold or rain."
WHO IS VISITING BEST OF LANGKAWI NOW?
"The stats now are really surprising. For the first time, Americans have started visiting the site in large numbers. This week 25% of our site visitors were from the USA, closely followed by 22% from Great Britain. We"re not sure what this means, but it may indicate that Americans that usually visit Thailand are looking at alternatives and may start arriving in larger numbers later this year.
"The top ten this week are USA, UK, Singapore, Australia, Japan, Hong Kong, France, Germany, Ireland & Canada. We also saw significant traffic from India, Philippines, Finland, Switzerland, South Africa, Indonesia, Netherlands, China, New Zealand, Thailand, Sweden, Italy, Saudi Arabia, Cyprus, Seychelles, United Arab Emirates, Norway and Oman.
"Of course travel patterns vary and our visitor stats change from week to week."
POINTING ONLINE & ARRIVING IN PERSON
"My experience during years of doing hotel bookings in Thailand shows that the increased online traffic is good news for Langkawi.
"Where people point with their mouse they often follow in person.
To promote your Langkawi business online contact Sri Indria Sari at 012-5647815 or email at sri@top-lah.com

Langkawi 07/04/2005