Most Britons Book Their Trips Online, Threatening Traditional Agent’s Business
Booking trips through online travel agencies is quickly gaining ground, making traditional travel agents obsolete. Recent data shows only 1 in 10 Britons will book their annual trip through an agent, the vast majority preferring online service: 66% of Britons state they will book through an online travel agent for their 2012 holiday.
Fresh research by TravelSupermarket revealed that just 14%of Britons intend to book their trip over the telephone and only 11% will visit a high street travel agent to book their holiday. In what research to decide where to go in 2012, only 12% of those surveyed would visit a shop to pick up brochures and discuss about destinations with an agent. An overwhelming 52% would rather use internet search engines and another 40% would check review websites like TripAdisor. Read more…
Australian Travelers Go Back to Traditional Travel Agents
Following in the footsteps of the banking sector, the travel industry in Australia shows a new emerging trend that puts traditional travel agents back into the heart of vacation booking action. Customers are currently more interested in having face-to-face contact with their agents instead of doing all their planning and booking through their computer, according to recent research.
For the first time in four years, the percentage of Australian travelers booking their international trips with traditional travel agents has risen. According to Roy Morgan Research data, 55% of travelers used a travel agent to book their latest overseas holiday or leisure trip in March, up 2% from December 2010. While a welcome increase, traditional travel agents are still far behind their 73% glory of 2007. Read more…
Orbitz Adds Facebook Send Button for Hotel Pages
Online travel site Orbitz has just added a new Facebook Send button on for the hotels they list to make it easier to share a certain hotel with individuals or groups via popular social network Facebook or via email. The booking site has thus become one of the first travel companies to integrate the Facebook Send button into their web pages and make it available to customers. Read more…
New Start-up Shows Room Views to Help Choose the Perfect Hotel
Probably one of the best features of online booking is the possibility choose from you own home the type of room you want, a duplex, a room with a view etc. Why is it so? Because it simply offers you some piece of mind. You are able to see on what you are spending money. Well, sort of! While most of us might not be disappointed by the interior of the room, more often than not we realize the window offers a great view of the hotel’s garbage bins or our much awaited ocean or sea view is actually blocked by some concrete monsters separating the hotel from the sea.
As the Internet evolves so do web-sites and services, consequently we are now able to talk about the next level of hotel room choosing – Room 77.
Room 77 really stands out due to their feature allowing you to actually see what your room view will be like and prevent any disappointment. Find out where the room is situated within a hotel and browse the Room 77 database with over 400,000 images of individual hotel-room views to make sure what you’ll see outside your window is to your liking. Read more…
Online Travel Booking on The Rise
A new study by IDC Retail Insights shows that consumers show an increasing preference for online methods when booking their travels and making other purchases. To reach these results, IDC surveyed 1,500 consumers in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Sweden. Online travel buying leads the growth purchasing trend, with 47% of respondents stating they had used the Internet to book their trips. Travel experts believe the online booking trend is not only significant for personal computers, as bookings and purchases from mobile phones via Internet are also on an up trend.
Richard Bray, of popular travel site Travelmatch.co.uk, says: “This study reflects the changing nature of the travel market and commerce in general. The days of going down to a physical travel agent are ending, as it is far more convenient to use an online provider from the comfort of your own home. It is also a cost effective option, as lower infrastructure in the travel industry means we are able to pass better savings on to our customers.” Read more…
Online Booking Sites Lose Ground to Traditional Travel Agents
Due to a growing frustration with online booking sites and a need to interact with actual humans when planning their vacations, travelers are returning from the web to the traditional travel agents. A new study by Forrester Research showed that in the first three months of 2010, 28% of leisure travelers in the U.S. who booked their trips online said they’d be interested switching to a good traditional travel agent, a 23% increase from 2008.
Another report by the same research company found that the number of leisure travelers who actually enjoyed using the Web to plan and book their vacations dropped from 53% in 2007 to 46% last year. The reasons for this drops are the growing frustration of travelers with the online booking sites which fail to simplify the increasingly complicated travel process or to meet their specific needs. Read more…
Test Your Travel Mojo with Stay.com’s Guess the City
If travels are you passion, then you might like to think you’d recognize places from the photos you see of them. Even if you haven’t visited all major cities around the world yet, you definitely have plans to, so you’ve done your research and list of places to see.
If you think you’ve got that travel mojo and would like to put it’s sharpness and quickness to a test, what better way than Stay.com’s “Guess the City” contest? You have to guess 10 cities in a limited amount of time after seeing a collage of distinctive tourist attractions.
Besides being extremely addictive, the game comes with prizes aimed to please the travel addicts. Free one week hotel stays in major cities around the world. Stay.com states the contest is open to players from all over the world, but they haven’t yet disclosed the list of cities they came up with. Nor did they mention if you get to choose or they pick the city for you. It will all be a big surprise for everybody.
One more thing, don’t fear the competition. Yes, you give your friends a chance to win by telling them all about the game, but you get points for doing it, so the threat and the karma boost are leveraged.
The contest ends on July 15. So come out and play until then and let me know what you think of the game. I for one have played it dozens of times and I can barely make myself stop playing 
Hope you have as much fun as I’ve had.
