Online Travel On Top

Written By: Sophia Powell on June 20, 2010 No Comment

Thanks to a colleague’s constant raves on online travel, a female traveler decided to plan her trip by herself. Now she can reel off her own list of Internet travel coups. She’s only getting started but she already has her hands on the following a train ticket from Chicago to New York City for just $33, a hotel suite accommodation in Austin, Texas for just $26 and best of all, a round trip airplane ticket to Denver for just $100.

Exceptional deals await those who would want to get away and relax somewhere for the weekend. Only with just one click and exceptionally fast internet connection, people can now get their hands on great bargains for travelers plus the fact that there are so many airline fare wars that let people afford their fares easily contribute to the sharp number of people looking to the internet for such great finds. An independent team specializing on travel research states that last year, over 35 million Americans bought their travel needs online. Nineteen million more researched destinations or places there, the company said.

The projections of another travel research outfit states that the Web is expected to generate $53 billion this year from leisure travel purchases alone, which makes up 22 percent of the travel industry’s income. Online travel is incredibly robust. It has gone over our own expectations. So many cool offers abound lately. A Chicago based online travel needs provider’s chief executive projects an even more dramatic growth ahead due to a freshly intensified competition among airlines.

The more prominent airlines have been slashing down their transcontinental fares as a response to the low cost carriers’ ability to add more routes and planes. If you are a usual East Coast to the West Coast traveler or if you know a lot on the Florida plane ride costs, then you should also be able to know a lot on the bloodbath that is the major airline’s newly lowered cost of labor, the high costs of fuel and finally, the bigger capacity in the marketplace. Thanks to the grave competition in this business arena, many of the major airlines, have been struggling through a tough financial situation this year, the first since 2001.

But in the online travel business, these kinds of prices, as long as it’s a safe travel environment, stimulative the marketplace for those of us who thrive on strong volume. But profitability is an issue for many travel dot coms. While an industry leader boasts a prosperous bottom line, both of the other biggest online travel agents, which are backed by the five biggest U.S.airlines, are still striving to achieve a net profit despite strong sales.

Earning is a hard task these days as increasingly web savvy people will transact deals with sites that can offer them great travel deals. Online travelers, about 35 percent of them, are brand loyal. A good example would be the tool that a web travel planner uses, which is never leaving any key travel websites unvisited. For the best plane, hotel, car and train deals, a traveling couple goes online.

It’s a sad reality that many of today’s travel agents’ business are hurting even when they can truly assist clients and enable them to avoid booking hassles, especially for the clients that don’t have the ability or time to hunt for the best deals in the Internet. But this is the way I perceive it, why bother with a travel agent when you can do it in the convenience of your desktop at home? The biggest sector in the online travel business is the hotel industry which boasts of $8.7 billion leisure bookings starting in 2003.

The two major players in the online travel business have turned the market share battle a notch with the way they spend on marketing and investment endeavors. In terms of capturing more corporate accounts, both prove to be successful. Among the most distinguished business analysts, one consensus echoes in order for the online agencies to attain success in their business ventures, they must shift into developing creative packages that includes car rental, airfare and hotel accommodation in just one attractive bundle. For the first time in history, its income, at least half of it, will emanate from other sources beyond those derived from plane ticket sales. He mentioned that travel deals are simply the hot things now. It is considered as a great commodity and many people espouse this but this won’t amount to people’s acceptance in the coming years.

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