Second Wave Petroleum Inc SCSZF

demise of the high street travel agent?

[idleSpeculator]

Caught the end of an program on Travel agents, some interesting if incomplete facts. We currently hear 95% of flights are booked through Travel Agents, 'analysts' (don't know which) predict 4 billion flights per annum will be booked over the web by 2005. I don’t know what % that is of the total. This does not necessarily affect Soalrs as they can provide information about discounted consolidator fares directly to third party web sites. However, unless the consolidator is hosting hes database on something like Tourtek, it may be just as asy for them to provide the information directly to the Web site and save the $7. An interview with the head of easyjet, (B2C Airline in UK, similar to southwest in US I think), said that from their 1st online booking in April 1998, 85% of bookings are now over the net. No travel agent fee, no consolidator, and no high street presence, other than the largest, cheapest Internet cafes in London. The destinations they fly to have significantly increased as have number of flights they operate in that time, although destinations are currently all European. Competition has been so fierce on pricing and easyjet so successful in the UK, that Ryanair, BA (with GO) and KLM (with BUZZ) have all copied the model. They already operate out of several europen airports and IMO it may only be a matter of time before they acquire transatlantic slots. The program concluded by saying tour operators will be selling many more holidays over the internet, and that inevitably high street travel agents will lose business and many will close. With high street travel agents a diminishing market, margins on scheduled flights being squeezed in future, Solars focus on Tourtek / Tour Operators and hosting / managing inventory and IT systems appears to be a very shrewd move for for long term growth / profits.