A new survey from Forrester Research indicates that the number of people booking trips through travel Web sites fell for the first time ever last year. I initially speculated that fewer people were traveling overall — travel costs have been rising and airports keep getting worse — but apparently some people are shifting back from Web sites to travel agents.
The New York Times reports that in the survey of 60,000 Internet users, Forrester found that the number who had used online travel sites this year was 9 percent lower than in 2005.
The story says that users want travel sites that can create entire vacations based on broad user preferences rather than forcing users to laboriously search via specific dates and locations. Site owners say it will be hard to enable such searches because the travel industry still uses primitive data systems devised in the 1960s.
I’m not sure I need travel sites that can translate my general preferences into entire vacations, but I would like a fast way to search airfares between two locations and know that the site had actually searched EVERY offer, even from companies like Southwest. I’d also like it to tell me whether I could save money by traveling on some other days that week and whether prices were going to go up or down.
I know some sites claim to do all those things already, but I’ve yet to find one that works as advertised. I often spend more than an hour looking for deals, and I shouldn’t have to do that anymore.
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