Tony Hallett's After These Messages: Time to travel

Advertising for those selling travel online - I'm thinking holidays and weekend breaks rather than business trips - is among the most persuasive around.

You don't have to work in London for long to notice dreary commuters targeted by campaigns showing all manner of exotic locations. Countries such as India, Turkey and New Zealand have got into branding in a big way of late but it's the banner names such as Expedia, Lastminute.com, Opodo and Travelocity that I want to talk about.

I have booked a lot of travel online, for work but mainly for holidays. It's isn't hard to see why general online spend is set to grow to a quarter of all retail sales in the near future - my household's second or third biggest expenditure every year goes to Hobermann at Lastminute.com or maybe the boys over at Ebookers.

Now this isn't a case of being seduced by the brands. Shopping around on the web is easy and I'll take a saving of a tenner here or there on a transatlantic flight when flitting from Opodo, to Ebookers, to Lastminute to individual airline websites.

I have never booked a thing through Expedia or Travelocity. It isn't uncommon to put in a common route, maybe even within Europe, and get a result that is hundreds of pounds above some other common sources.

Indeed a couple of weeks ago a row broke out at a Berlin travel conference when the chief executive of the Hilton hotel chain openly accused Expedia of bumping up prices by 30 per cent or so. Expedia, for the record, took umbrage - how could it survive if its prices are so uncompetitive?

So my question today is whether marketing muscle is effective for these companies? Does Alan "Hello world!" Wicker on a sushi conveyor belt or his voice or face stuck behind someone in an exotic location work wonders for Travelocity? The answer is obvious: it must do or the companies wouldn't continue in the same vein - but the winners in the long-term aren't so certain.

While a host of online travel companies have fallen by the wayside and there are still those who predict a bid for Lastminute.com by a more old-fashioned travel beast - a reason for a surging share price over recent months, some say - success will ultimately be relative.

Will there be room for all the top six or so players in the UK in three years? Probably not.

It seems increasingly like the companies that win out are those who are closest to their customers. It has to be about more than a fortnightly email from Teletext Holidays or Cheaper-than-cheapest-flights.com - or even that flashy billboard campaign at a mainline station.

Lastminute.com, to come back to them, regularly emails almost three million people in the UK - two times that many across the rest of Europe - and its latest series of ads urges people to make the most of every ounce of their spare time. (That we have so little spare time these days is another matter for debate but at least companies acknowledge many a person's current working reality.) Advertising features parodies of well-known book sleeves or Monday 'blues' co-ordinated radio pitches.

My bet is that we will continue to witness innovation from the online travel sector - it would be criminal if we didn't, given the things that are being sold. But the winners long-term, in a sector where shouting about what you have matters so much, will be those with a close relationship to customers, especially past customers.

As we all know, the customer acquisition phase is becoming less important - and from now on flashy TV campaigns or peeling billboards alone won't cut it.