The hunt for online travel bargains
My business partner June was watching King 5 news last night and saw a re-broadcast of this piece about online travel. It is an excellent example of how technology is changing the way consumers search for and purchase travel products. The blog post about the segment states that 71% of those surveyed purchased their airline tickets online directly from the airline. When you combine this with the 70+% who do their research using social networking technologies, you can begin to see the impact that the web is having on the already competitive travel marketplace. Although the segment didn’t really give any indications on how online searching is affecting brick and mortar travel agents directly, you can guess that they are probably not happy about it. I posted a comment about my recommendation to travel agents (”Keeping Travel Agents Relevant“) that if they expect to survive this trend of cutting out the intermediaries, they need to focus on value add services that can’t easily be fulfilled through technology alone.
You can read the post from King5 here.
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