Airbnb ended 2016 ahead of Booking.com for the first time in visitor numbers on US travel websites, although Expedia remains ahead of both.

Data released by audience tracking service SimilarWeb saw the home sharing service reach 87.8 million visits in the last quarter of the year.

This was 5.5 million ahead of Booking.com and reversed their respective positions in the same period the previous year (Booking.com had 66.5 million; Airbnb had 61.7 million).

Expedia secured 136.4 million in Q4 2016, up from 120.4 million in Q4 2015, according to SimilarWeb.

Booking.com sister sites Priceline achieved 80.8 million and Kayak got 77.4 million

TripAdvisor remains the most popular travel site in the US, with 226.5 million visitors in Q4 2016, although this was apparently down by 0.6 million visits from the same three months in 2015.

Other brands recorded to be losing traffic included Orbitz (down 17% year-on-year in the last quarter to 30.4 million), Hotwire (down 18% to 24.1 million) and Cheaptickets (down 20% to 10.7 million).

In the airline category, Southwest had almost 30 million visits during the quarter more than its nearest competitor, American Airlines, which scored 85.7 million.

Delta was up 12% between Q4 2015 and Q4 2016 to 77.8 million, whilst United and Jetblue also increased their visitor numbers to 67.3 million and 40.4 million respectively.

Low-cost carriers account for 57.5% of all airline website traffic in the US and 57.1% of all traffic to intermediary sites in the last quarter of 2016 came from a mobile device.

NB: US travel map image via Freeimages.