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Europeans still booking travel online
Carol Rheem, director, research at PhoCusWright, says, "As Europeans seek to make the most of their treasured time off this year, they are increasingly using online options to plan the best holiday for their budget." She continues, "Online travel agencies are weathering this economic storm better than any other booking channel."
Though there's still room for some sort of surprise by the end of the year (not likely), the European online travel space is expected to see gross bookings of €23 billion when we close the book on 2009, with supplier websites lagging online travel agencies.
"Even in the bleak travel backdrop of 2009, some travel companies are thriving -- and not all of them are OTAs [online travel agencies]. Countercyclical trends bolster these companies while exacerbating decline for others. Those dependent on business travelers are among the hardest hit," Rheem observes. Business travel is expected to be off 17 percent for the year.
Filed under: Business, Europe, Internet Tools
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Unexpected Traveller Oct 25th 2009 2:12PM
While a lot of my personal travel is done through online bookings (for the reasons mentioned above), my company does tend to use agencies for bookings. The reason for that is simple - if booking with an agency, we can get a line of credit which means that our cash flow can be better managed.
It's a sad fact of life that agencies can continue to get (mainly) business travel because these customers can avoid paying up front. Perhaps if they had to offer some kind of value-added service, perhaps using some online feature like tripit.com, they could win back some customers ...
The U T
Bianca Oct 26th 2009 9:43AM
HostelsClub.com offers discounted rates and benefits to large groups including company travel even though we deal just with accommodations and some tours, so I have found even travel agencies to contact us directly regarding business travelers, so in the end they do use online booking agencies as well. However, there has been an increase in terms of online booking for both personal and group bookings in terms of cheap accommodation.