Hospitality Industry News and Statistics That Make a Case for Broadband and Full Screen Virtual Tours


Web Statistics and Trends Indicate More and More People are Using Higher Screen Resolutions.
Web statistics indicate that Internet Explorer 6 is the dominating browser, XP is the most popular operating system, and most users are using a display with 1024x768 pixels or more, with a color depth of at least 65K colors. They also indicate that 90% percent of Internet users have Java turned on. See why screen resolution matters here.
Online Travel Sales Boom
eMarketer, ComScore, Forrester Research, Jupiter Research and PhoCusWright predict Online Sales to Keep Increasing. eMarketer reports that by 2010 roughly 46 percent of total travel sales will be booked online, second only to computer hardware/software in the B2C category.
Broadband Use in the United States and One Billion People Online Worldwide.
eMarketer estimates that at the end of 2005 over 40% of US online households were still using dial-up. This will decline to less than 15% of online households by 2010.
Explosive Growth For Booking Travel on the Internet.
Travel planning and booking on the Web are among the most popular online activities in major e-commerce markets, and online travel sales are growing at an explosive rate (over $115 billion this year) in the US, Europe and the Asia-Pacific regions.

Online Travelers Prefer Booking Directly on the Hotel Website
Recently Forrester Research found that 69% of US leisure travelers prefer to buy online directly from a supplier while just 27% prefer to buy from intermediaries. The direct-to-consumer model should become the foundation, the centerpiece of any hotel company's online distribution strategy. Why? First of all, The Internet is the ultimate "Direct Distribution Medium". Second, as shown from the surveys above, the online traveler shows a clear preference to deal directly with the hotel and its website.

The End of the Merchant Model as We Know It
The explosion of the "merchant model" after 9/11 caught the hospitality industry by surprise. Over the last 4 years many hoteliers have been struggling to decrease their dependence on the online merchants and to develop direct online distribution strategies of their own.

Third-Party Booking Sites Still Dominate Internet Sales
Why Do So Many Consider this Bad?What Went Wrong with Direct Web Distribution in Hospitality?


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