UK care hire has been revealed as the most popular travel search outside of flight bookings for Australian travelers. In the latest survey from Hitwise, the Experian company who reports on web traffic, has revealed the UK’s most popular travel search terms, with the US and Australia the biggest shoppers.

The results show that searches for flights or flight related information to the UK have more than doubled over the past year for Australian (up 50.4%) and US (up 55.6%) users. The weakening pound has been singled out as the main cause as the UK, traditionally an expensive destination, became a more attractive and economically viable proposition. Australia and the US are the biggest markets for British tourism.

London was specified in half of the searches while Edinburgh was the next most searched for destination. In the US the most commonly searched for topic was ‘map of England’ while Aussies chose car hire.

In terms of US based flight bookings, cheapflights.com was the most popular search engine ahead of British Airways while Virgin Atlantic also made the top 5. In the non-domestic airline division British Airways was again the most popular, coming in at 17th overall. Virgin Atlantic came in at number 28, with Ryanair at 47 and easyJet at number 68.

For Australian travelers, Malaysian Airlines was the carrier of preference ahead of Emirates, Etihad, Qantas and Virgin. Qantas remains Australia’s most frequented airline site but BA and Virgin fell behind the major Asian operators in terms of hits and bookings.

The statistics show a strong trend for overseas travelers booking travel to London with the big airlines but also planning mini-trips around Europe using local budget airlines.