Hotel Technology Resource

Description

The great online travel revolution
Date: 2009-12-16
Industry: -Hotel-Gaming-Travel-Cruise-Bed and Breakfast-Airline- Category: Internet

The noughties heralded the rise of self-service travel websites, bringing with them a boom in cheap flights and last-minute budget breaks. Bobbie Johnson looks back.
Over the last 10 years the way we travel has been revolutionised by the web. Many of us waved goodbye to high-street travel agents, newspaper classifieds and hours spent staring at endless Teletext pages, and logged on to new hi-tech services.

As the web began taking hold of the public's imagination, the burst of sites and services began shifting the way we thought about travelling, making the idea of grabbing a bag and jetting off cheaper and easier than ever. In fact, the swell of activity in the travel industry seemed so lucrative that it was one of the cornerstones of the dotcom boom.

The boom itself may have ended ignominiously, with many of the individual names crashing spectacularly, but our approach to travel itself remained irrevocably altered.

Britain's travel revolution circled around a pair of innovations that had the web at their heart.

First was the ability to search for what you wanted. In the days before Google, web search was a limited business that was finding its feet. In the mid to late 1990s, a number of sites realised that they could offer a clear way to cut through the jumble, underpinned by vast amounts of information going through computerised reservation systems such as Amadeus and Worldspan. Joining up those dots may seem obvious in retrospect, but it was a revelation at the time.


Sites like Ryanair and easyJet made finding your own cheap flight easier
Second was the ability to buy low-cost plane tickets online. The low-cost airline model

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