UK travel agents ignore Web opportunities

Nearly 90 per cent of UK travel agents are not taking online travel sites seriously, according to a survey by Internet systems integrator, Web.

The report found that although ecommerce will have a huge impact on the travel industry as a whole, most agents still view it as a niche market.

The London-based firm teamed up with Ascend Comunications to assess online offerings and their potential effect on the UK travel market. The results suggest that most companies, excluding the larger ones, are not incorporating IT into their business strategies as well as they could.

Only six per cent of respondents, for example, have phone systems with computer telephony integration (CTI) capabilities. Call centres are perceived, the report claims, "quite incorrectly, to be expensive and are therefore only used by larger companies".

Adam Daum, analyst at Inteco, said only certain sectors of the travel industry, such as business travel, will be affected in the short term. "Business travel will change much more quickly than consumer travel. Business people tend to buy components such as flights rather than discounted packages, and a high proportion have access to the Internet."

However, he added that only a strong competitive drive will get the industry as a whole online. "The industry has traditionally used a Videotec system, which is pretty outdated and should probably be changed to a Web-based network, but what is the incentive? The whole industry needs to switch so everyone can access the data from airlines and travel operators, but at the moment there is no competitive drive."

Despite the gloomy findings, Web still predicts the worldwide online travel business will see revenues of over $20bn over the next three years.