Tourism: Keeping pace with online travel
"In 2008, 36 percent of all European travel will be booked online," said Marcos Isaac, the director of corporate and distributor channels at Amadeus, a company which provides e-solutions for travel agencies. With opportunities for profit increasingly found online, Polish companies lined up last week at the e-Travel Forum 2008 event in Warsaw to find out how they could get a slice of the pie.
Of course, many branches of the tourism industry are already well-represented online. Hotels such as Orbis, Holiday Inn and Kyriad Prestige already offer e-booking services, while airlines long ago learned the value of an online presence. Polish rail company PKP Intercity and bus-ticket seller Voyager are also present on the web.
But the market is changing fast. "Technology is moving at an incredible pace and impacting the travel industry directly. Consumers are getting more and more demanding every day," said Isaac.
Thus, travel agencies are learning to offer a full range of services from a single site. Travellers can do everything from booking a hotel to buying an airplane ticket to reserving a place on a specialized tour. While such sites are familiar to Westerners, traditional travel agencies in Poland are struggling to compete.
"We have to recognize the power of the internet in the 21st century," said Jan Korsak, the president of the Polish Chamber of Tourism. "The most significant factor is online sales, which is an excellent way to meet customers' needs," said Jarosław Kowalski, IT director at PKP Intercity.
Meanwhile, some firms are offering solutions for Polish travel agencies looking to increase their impact online. Along with Amadeus, firms like Travel Tech and Galileo were at the forum to promote their services.
Amadeus' Isaac predicted, however, that a strong online presence would soon not be enough. "It is all about empowering the customers and giving them control of the process even when they are on the move," he said. "Mobile devices will become the remote control to access and manage the travel experience," he added.
