Hold on to your tiny plastic cutlery, new statistics have just landed showing that traffic to travel websites in Australia was up by more than 30 percent in 2010.

The research published in PhoCusWright’s Australian Online Travel Traffic Report was undertaken in partnership with comScore, and found that one in two people, or 5.8 million monthly users, visited travel websites last year. At a growth rate of 30 percent year over year, that is ten times the overall growth rate for all Internet traffic of 3 percent.

“Online travel is a mature Internet category in Australia, but it is also growing much more quickly than it is in similarly developed markets in North America,” says Douglas Quinby, senior director of research at PhoCusWright.

That makes travel Australia’s favourite Internet category, as well as its fastest growing, and Australian travel providers are climbing aboard, taking off and riding the thermal columns of this trend by increasing their online presence.