Have Net access, will travel

British holiday-makers and travel agents have so far ignored the digital revolution. But, with Bill Gates set to launch his Expedia booking system in the UK, change is coming. By Dorothy Walker

Travel and technology are the fastest-growing areas of commercial activity on the planet. It is estimated that more than $1bn will be paid online for travel this year.

But most holiday buyers still book one of the costliest items in the family budget on the basis of a brochure picture the size of a postage stamp and 100 words of unhelpful information. That is going to change: colour, video and sound are bringing excitement to tourism Web sites. According to the research firm Jupiter Communications, almost half of all the money spent online is paid for travel. Out on the Web, you can book a flight to Ulan Bator, work out the best route from the airport to your hotel in Manhattan, even join a video walkthrough at a guesthouse in Tucson, Arizona.

Until recently, travellers were content to surf for basic travel facts: very few actually took the plunge and made an e-booking. Information was widely dispersed, and ensuring that you were getting a good deal called for a major expedition around the sites of individual airlines, hotel chains and tour operators.

This has changed with the arrival of a new breed of travel service designed to bring together everything that will encourage you to buy. Some services, such as Uniglobe Online, are run by travel specialists. Others, like those provided by CompuServe and AOL, have their roots in the computer industry. And the newest kid on the block is Microsoft, poised to shake up the UK travel business.

The pounds 28bn man, Bill Gates, will launch his Expedia travel service here in June. Part of a publicly accessible area of the Microsoft Network (MSN), Expedia has been running in the US since November. Anyone can book flights, hotels and car hire, as well as join point-and-click tours and use a "fare tracker" that finds the cheapest scheduled fare to any chosen destination. "In the UK, we are also going to offer last-minute bucket-shop fares - they are much more important to consumers here than in America," says Microsoft's Taylor Collyer. "You can also imagine that package holidays are really high on our list of priorities."

Travel agent AT Mays will act as Expedia's British back office, and users will be able to phone a real person for help. But guided by a "booking wizard", says Collyer, an ordinary person will find it easy to book online. "It's like the way you and I would interact with the travel agent."

Does this mean the end for the high street travel agent, as some experts predict? Probably not, as a vast number of holiday buyers don't even have access to the Net. But many British agents appear to be ignoring the digital revolution, rather than embracing it.

Of the 7,000 agents and 650 tour operators who are members of the Association of British Travel Agents (ABTA), less than 1 per cent are on the Internet. ABTA's Jackie Gibson, who hadn't heard of Expedia, says: "While the Internet may take a small amount of business away from agencies, it is never going to replace them. There is a big difference between spending a small amount of money on the Internet - say, pounds 15 for a jumper - and buying a holiday, which on average costs pounds 360. That is a lot of money to part with if you are not sure you have looked at every option."

The experiences of Welsh-based Internet Holidays suggest otherwise, however. Its year-old Web site, billed as "Europe's number one travel site", scores 72,000 hits in a good week, and, in a remarkable feat of reverse engineering, the company has opened two high street Internet Holidays shops as a spin- off.

David Dibble, the company's development manager, says: "Our highest-value Internet booking so far was a pounds 6,000 cruise. There is a huge difference between Net customers and shop visitors. Net customers are higher-value, more aware - they tend to look for cruises, trips to Kenya, multiple stop- offs. They ask a lot of questions and want a lot of information about their holiday. This was all a surprise - when we went on to the Web we thought we were going to specialise in last-minute holidays.

"We got in very early. But now that Microsoft has decided to launch Expedia in the UK, the travel industry has got to wake up," Dibble warns. "Either Microsoft will completely dominate the market, and blow everyone else out of it, or we have all got to get together and come up with some sort of viable alternative.

"The industry now has to really think about what the Internet is going to be. Microsoft is going to raise the awareness of travel on the Net and inspire consumer confidence. That's good for everybody, so it's an opportunity"n

Uniglobe Online http://www.uniglobe.com

Expedia http://expedia.msn.com

Internet Holidays http://www.holiday.co.uk