This is a blog about what is going on in the online travel business. You can keep track of the trends in the online travel market from this site.
Today, anyone who has an Internet access can make a travel search and book his or her hotel room, book flight tickets, rent a car, buy a cruise deal. This was not the case 10 years ago when the WWW boom was just emerging.
Gradually online travel agencies opened their web sites (e.g. Expedia) and provided all kinds of services online. Even the classical phone call was replaced by live support chats and inquiry forms. Agencies were publishing their hotels and the offline rates they got from their tour operator contracts. Clients could make searches by destination, dates, room types and etc. and select among the search results.
A few years was enough to evolve into the age of real time availability. Tour operators (e.g. Travco, Miki, Tourico, Special Tours, Hotelbeds) with thousands of hotel contracts all around the world provided XML interfaces to travel agencies. Agents could provide real time results for hotels, cars, and flights. Real time packages was also available to travel buyers.
As these new technologies were adopted by new web sites, the market started to demand something new. Any search from Google or Yahoo can bring thousands of results (e.g. paris hotels, from which it is very hard to select. What can be the criteria? Rates, extras, discount coupons, trust ...
Finally price comparison systems like Kayak, HotelsCombined appeared. Hundreds of hotel, flight, car suppliers were compared in these systems and the customer can easily spot the best deals. It was a great improvement in travel search which saves time and money.
The market is still evolving presenting new concepts to online travel sales like mobile search, map services, traveler reviews and forums.
Let's see what is next.
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