Emarketer: "The online travel segment grew rapidly over the past three years, and growth is projected to be in the high teens for the next three years. So why are online travel agencies belting up for a bumpy ride?
As consumer options proliferate and the online travel market matures, eMarketer's new report, Travel Agencies Online explores the question of who is going to win and who is going to lose in the race to dominate this $66 billion US market.
According to eMarketer estimates, online travel sales will increase a "mere" 20% this year to $58 billion. Growth will continue at roughly this level through 2007 — short of the 57% growth registered in 2002, but a respectable gain nonetheless...
...with success has come competition. Selling direct, airlines and hotel chains have aggressively entered the market. Now shoppers bounce from site to site in search of the lowest price, and online travel search engines are springing up, serving up aggregated fares from multiple sources."
This latter statement about competition is the most likely reason for the online travel agencies question... I have always had serious doubts about travel sites which merely put the bricks and mortar agency model online. Such sites are severely limited in their exploitation of the benefits of internet commerce and are at the base of many of the search engine optimisation challenges within the travel sector - as such there is still a huge need for innovation to overturn this out dated model.
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