• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, July 20, 2005

Online travel spending climbed by 25 percent year-over-year to $5.1 billion in June, according to a comScore Media Metrix analysis released on Tuesday. Traffic currents in June largely driven by traditional summer pastimes--travel, sporting, and cooking--were led by the hotels and resorts category, which saw a traffic increase of 9 percent to 34.9 million visitors in June.

InterContinental Hotels Group and Marriott were among the Web's highest-gaining properties for June, with 21 and 18 percent visitation gains, respectively. Also, the ground/cruise subcategory gained five percent--rising to 10.6 million visitors, as Carnival Cruises led the category with 2.1 million visitors.

ComScore also noted a bump in traffic to map sites, led by MapQuest, with 45.7 million visitors in June, Yahoo! Maps, with 21.3 million, and MSN MapPoint, with 5 million.

General Motors' "Employee Discount" financing option--along with other highly publicized promotions in June--helped car manufacturers steer considerable traffic their way compared to last year, comScore reported. General Motors led with 8.5 million visitors to its brand sites--a 7 percent month-over-month increase and a 60 percent year-over-year increase. Over 3.5 million surfers visited GM.com alone, a 29 percent increase compared to last month.

MitsubishiCars.com saw a traffic spike in June, increasing 259 percent to 1.2 million visitors thanks to an interactive advertisement for its Eclipse model. Also, traffic to DaimlerChrysler jumped 17 percent between May and June, due in part to the buzz surrounding the release of its new Dodge Charger model.

Forbes' site was the highest-gaining property in June, with 28 percent month-over-month growth to 6.4 million visits, which comScore attributed to the release of the Forbes' "Celebrity 100" list of the top paid U.S. personalities. To a lesser extent, online photo site Snapfish also did very well with a 27 percent gain to 3.6 visitors, due to service price cuts. Open source network Mozilla.org ranked third in terms of percentage gain, with 5.8 million visits--up 21 percent since May.