The leisure industry is pleasantly sailing down the cyberspace currents

Laid back on the e-commerce lounge, the travel and Internet industries have happily tied up the knot. Today, roughly 80 percent of all hotel bookings are made on the World Wide Web and this can’t make hotel companies, travel agents and tourists any happier. According to 2010 reports, only in Spain the cyberspace is dominated by hotels (94 percent), rural tourism (88 percent) and logistics (85 percent). The boom of mobile phones has helped realize this bound and make it stronger. As much as 44 percent of tourists who use their cell phones on their trips just do it to find accommodation. At the same time, the Internet has panned out to be a must-have tool for the presentation and promotion of companies in the travel business, as well as for their marketing campaigns. What’s more, information technology online apps, especially for invoicing and accounting, are all the rage. The fact that tourism is construed as an inter-territorial activity has turned it into a very attractive industry for the development of information technology. Moreover, the involvement of leisure and entertainment needs a promotional platform to be launched on mass media, and that platform has to get across a convincing message. Therefore, no other information or communication technology delivers more benefits to the travel industry than the Internet, and it does it to such an extent that it has forced changes in trade and competition schemes in an effort to piece together 24/7 service in every nook and cranny of the world. Word has it that it was back in 1960 when airlines created the first information systems just for the purchase of plane tickets. However, only a decade later the new tool was successfully installed in travel agencies. At that time, the only contact hotel chains had with that information system was through a computerized reservation central network that barely Holiday Inn, Sheraton and five other independent hotels had. This situation took a sea change in the 1980s. The systems crafted by the airlines were capable of booking hotels and they were then called Computerized Booking Systems. A few years later, the Global Distribution Systems (GDSs) popped up as mighty marketing tools currently used by lodging companies in approximately 125 countries for the promotion of their offers. Relying on this database, travel agents have access to accurate and up-to-the-minute information on infrastructure, let alone they can now pinpoint a hotel on a map and even zoom in for closer details. Worldwide, the main GDSs are Galileo, Sabre, Amadeus, Worldspan, System One and Book Hotel. Cutting-edge technology has also provided better understanding of the customers’ needs, stepped up home deliveries, reached out to a larger number of people and streamlined resources for the sake of heightened efficiency.

Tourism 2.0 The height of Internet 2.0 and social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Orkut) has exerted a tremendous influence on the sector and has prompted companies to rally around that web cosmography. And even though social networks have not entered way too deep into the industry, the smartest ones have already designed web-based services and have started to keep tabs on the users’ so-called content generation markets. A comment posted in one of the social networks, for instance, on uneven service quality within a hotel chain –with hotels operating in different locations- can actually downgrade the brand. The corporate name makes people consider that service is the same in terms of the quality offered by the company. Quite recently, the so-called social guidebooks –like Gowalla and Foursquare- have come out with direct focus on travel. And blogtrips –fam trips to a destination through comments and reviews made by bloggers and influential people on the social networks and their own sites- have also caught on. Many times surfers don’t even rely on the information provided by the industry’s established businesses or infrastructures. Thus, social network users have become the ultimate travel service guides as they deliver top-of-the-line contents to be shared with their contacts. By doing that, they become prosumers, a term that currently defines that dual character of producers and consumers. In the meantime and unlike previous decades, once tourists have chosen a particular travel destination, they set out on an all-out online search to compare prices and fares, as well as to check on product conditions. In this effort, netizens bank on servers, metasearch engines, add-ons and corporate websites. According to a recent study conducted by Google and OTX entitled “Travelers’ Road to Decision,” the Internet is the number-one decision-making source for would-be trippers, interacting with promo videos they watch before making the purchase. For them, contents lodged in experts’ sites speak louder since fifty percent of them have bought some kind of tourist product based on other users’ experiences. The German market, with little more than 80 million inhabitants, churns out some 70 million outbound travelers every year. For Deutsch trippers, both the Internet and the social networks are by far the main source of information, while travel agencies, fairs, guidebooks, friends and specialized magazine trail behind. In Latin America, the World Wide Web has also become a key tool. With an economy that lures an increasing number of investors –an estimated growth of over 5 percent in 2010 and 4 percent in 2011- the region has put a special spin on key technology areas, like e-commerce, that generated a whopping $21.8 billion in 2009 and it should be way above $34.5 billion by the end of 2011, according to Visa. In the same breath, the region is relying on this platform to get a tighter grip of business travel and the MICE market, currently dominated by Argentina and Brazil. Experts agree that the Internet and the social networks have played a major role in reorienting the international image of Latin American nations in terms of tourism. In this sense, they are thought to have made a splash in the promotion and diversification of destinations and products for the sake of higher numbers of incoming tourists and repeat travelers.