More travel bought online than off in 2007 : Kathika Travel Website

You don’t have to think back very far to remember a time when you physically went to the travel agent to book the flights for your next vacation – and for that matter, came home with a valuable paper ticket that you were scared of losing.

Things change fast, and if you’re reading this blog, the chances are pretty high that you now do most or all of your travel shopping online. It’s so easy to get information, book flights and make hotel and tour reservations that many of us are planning our vacations from the convenient location of our desks.

And the statistics are backing this up: a recent consumer trends survey showed that 2007 was the first year when the volume of sales of travel was higher online than offline, at least in the United States. For the first time, the majority of travel products – 51%, in fact – were bought over the internet. The study predicts that this could increase to 56% in 2008 and 60% in 2009.

An interesting sideline from the study also found that it’s becoming more common for travelers to buy the components of their vacation individually. In other words, we are buying our flights and booking our accommodation separately, probably to get a better deal, rather than buying packages of the kind preferred by travel agents.

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