The noughties heralded the rise of self-service travel websites, bringing with them a boom in cheap flights and last-minute budget breaks. Bobbie Johnson looks back.
Over the last 10 years the way we travel has been revolutionised by the web. Many of us waved goodbye to high-street travel agents, newspaper classifieds and hours spent staring at endless Teletext pages, and logged on to new hi-tech services.
As the web began taking hold of the public's imagination, the burst of sites and services began shifting the way we thought about travelling, making the idea of grabbing a bag and jetting off cheaper and easier than ever. In fact, the swell of activity in the travel industry seemed so lucrative that it was one of the cornerstones of the dotcom boom.
The boom itself may have ended ignominiously, with many of the individual names crashing spectacularly, but our approach to travel itself remained irrevocably altered.
Britain's travel revolution circled around a pair of innovations that had the web at their heart.
First was the ability to search for what you wanted. In the days before Google, web search was a limited business that was finding its feet. In the mid to late 1990s, a number of sites realised that they could offer a clear way to cut through the jumble, underpinned by vast amounts of information going through computerised reservation systems such as Amadeus and Worldspan. Joining up those dots may seem obvious in retrospect, but it was a revelation at the time.
Sites like Ryanair and easyJet made finding your own cheap flight easier
Second was the ability to buy low-cost plane tickets online. The low-cost airline model itself wasn't new - it had already been pioneered by American operator Southwest in the 1970s and then closer to home by Ryanair in the early 1990s. But combined with the deregulation of the European airline industry, the idea went stellar once the web began to find a firm footing with customers.
The easy-to-use self-service websites cut out every middleman and let people explore in a way they hadn't done before. How many of us spent hours weighing up the options of a two-week break in far-flung destinations in corners of Europe we'd never heard of, let alone visited?
In both cases, the benefits were not only clear to customers, but they made sense to businesses too - whether it was a package tour company shifting the last few spaces, an airline making sure it got bums on seats, or a hotel selling off empty rooms on the cheap. The internet opened the door to dynamic pricing - customising prices to individual consumers or fluctuating demand in the market.
External Source - For the complete article click here.
Source - Guardian
Logos, product and company names mentioned are the property of their respective owners.
