Every travel industry disruption has turning points, and they make the headlines with good reason.
The headline for this edition of ‘It Happened This Week’ is: ‘Major hotel chains report more bookings from Internet than GDSs for first time in second quarter’
As Travelweek notes, for the first time ever, more hotel rooms were booked online in the second quarter of the year than through the GDSs.
According to data from TravelClick’s consolidated Q2 eTRAK results, the Internet contributed 37.3%, or 7,605,440 reservations, of the total Central Reservations Office (CRO) reservations at major hotel brands. That was a year-over-year 19.9% increase. Meanwhile GDS bookings accounted for 36.4%, or 7,425,301 reservations.
It was a turning point for sure: the first time Internet reservations for the major hotel chains surpassed GDS reservations.
Travelweek’s story also noted that Tony Pollard, still serving at that time as President of the Hotel Association of Canada, said that in Canada, hotel bookings through travel agencies had fallen drastically, to just 4% of leisure bookings and 11 – 12% of corporate bookings.
Back when this story ran, consumers were rushing to book everything online, and travel advisors dug in for one of the toughest times of their industry careers.
Of course, in the 17 years since, travel advisors have shown just how crucial a helping hand and personal service can be for travel bookings – through tumultuous world events, catastrophic weather and, of course, the pandemic. And that’s something the OTAs can’t touch.
Did the headline appear in Travelweek in 2006, 2016 or 2020?
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