Which way? ... one of the first decisions about a big trip is how to book it.
Mark Juddery reports on the latest trends in flight and holiday bookings.
Worldwide, a quarter of all travel bookings last year were made online. And in the US, the number of main-street travel agencies has halved in the past decade as travellers go straight to the web. In Australia, traditional travel agents are still popular but the future may not be so bright. Business information analyst IBISWorld predicts a difficult year for these agents, following the further decline in international tourism and the growth in online booking sites.
But before you mourn the impending doom of the shopfront travel agent, note that the projected losses are not as bad as expected: a 1.9 per cent fall in revenue for this year (to $2.71 billion), and a 1.3 per cent decrease in employment.
Meanwhile, online travel is growing rapidly.
A recent Jigsaw Research-Google Travel Study suggests that, however they are reserved, 77 per cent of all trips booked in Australia are at least researched online.
But another study by the US-based Forrester Research sends another message: a small but growing number of travellers are losing interest in travel sites. The study surveyed 4634 adults, all of whom use travel sites. Only 46 per cent of respondents say they enjoy booking travel online - down from 53 per cent in 2007.
The change was significant enough for some media to investigate. Toronto's Globe and Mail spoke to Lea Pawloski, a Canadian woman who used a major online agency to book flights for her honeymoon - and found $C900 ($942) debited from her credit card but no reservation.
This was followed by 10 days of phone calls and hours left on hold. "After that," she said, "I decided to go with a travel agency in my neighbourhood."
Online travel doesn't have an exclusive on horror travel stories. Yet the convenience of internet bookings still can't compare with talking to an expert travel agent - as Sharon Ireland, of Turramurra, 25, recently discovered.
Like many people her age, she has travelled extensively without ever setting foot in a travel agency. But recently, she was converted when friends used a shopfront travel agency to book a trip to Thailand.
"The personal knowledge, hints and assistance with adjusted travel plans ensured their travel was seamless," she says. "This has prompted me to do the same for the future."
Despite some industry concern when websites such as Travelocity and Zuji first entered the Australian market, our neighbourhood travel agents have not suffered as they have in the US. "Americans travel differently," Flight Centre spokesman Haydn Long says.
"They go to the Caribbean or the other side of the country. They aren't very adventurous travellers. Australians are going to the UK or Asia. It's much more complicated."
According to Long, Flight Centre still conducts 95 per cent of its business over the counter.
The global recession of last year, however, saw an increase in online travel, as Australians chose to stay closer to home, taking simpler, easy-to-book options such as New Zealand and Singapore.
"Customer inquiry [in shopfronts] was as good as it's ever been," Long says. "But people sat back and waited to see if they still had a job."
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This article was very interesting to me because it shows how nowadays trends (concerning the online bookings) are unsure. Indeed, from my point of view two of the main difficulties that those different systems represent for the customer are first the fact that the customer doesn’t experience the same quality of service as he would in a traditional travel agency and the other argument is that indeed online services represent a high level of risks (as the article shows it with the debits with no reservation). I also think that many customers get lost in the huge choice of websites they are offered (either those website are OTA, Portals, aggregators…).
RépondreSupprimerWhat I think, is that for sure Hotels need to stay present on some restrictive number of websites so they can control in a way their competition. However, from my point of view it is definitely time for them to really think and analyse the distribution of their products differently. First of all, many of them don’t pay enough attention to their own websites. Secondly, they might need to be more attentive to the terms and conditions of their distributors: it is important that their clients don’t have a bad image of the hotel only because they had a bad experience with an OTA. What I think, is that those hotels would better do use reverse auctions because customers don’t bother to make the difference between the OTA and the Hotel. And finally, I think that hotels need to invest time for working their reputation online themselves. All this huge distribution might be very dangerous for them.