Thomson maps out the online travel marketplace

The UK’s leading travel company Thomson today provided insights into how technology is changing the way people book travel.

Speaking at Thomson’s annual Online Booking Report, Director of New Media Graham Donoghue, painted the picture of the UK online travel market which is worth £17 billion – all of which has grown from nothing in the past 10 years.

Thomson now sells 60% of its holidays online – having evolved significantly in recent years shifting from package holidays being booked through its travel agencies to customers piecing together components of their trip at Thomson.co.uk.  

Thomson.co.uk has content and product range that leads the UK online travel market - 30,000 hotels have satellite images from Google, over 2000 videos and thousands of customer reviews and images. Thomson.co.uk ranks 2nd in the travel sites hit list behind Expedia.

Graham explained how Thomson is changing as customers move away from booking traditional packages to buying hotels, flights and or differentiated packages other services and piecing them together themselves. It is now possible for customers at Thomson.co.uk to combine Thomson hotels and products with either Thomsonfly flights or flights from 500 other airlines. Being able to combine third party flights will give customers the opportunity to be able to travel with Thomson with maximum flexibility and choice.

Package, which is rapidly declining, was tipped to become an upmarket holiday concept in the future – similar to the shift in house renovation from DIY to GSI (Get Someone In) – customers will use the service and products of a professional in the future to ensure that everything is taken care of and the strain of selecting and arranging their travel plans is in the hands of an expert.

Travel agents will continue to evolve in the way they interact with the internet and customers – the introduction of user powered search - where customers talk online to travel agents and the agent can push content and information to them electronically – enabling customers to have the service of an agent electronically.

User powered search will be the next step in Thomson’s retail strategy following the success of the its Virtual Call Centre (VCC) – which routes callers through to Thomson’s network of travel shops – where agents pick up the calls between serving customers present in their shops. The VCC has proved very effective with the business achieving more cost effective booking conversion rates and the agents happy to have the opportunity to earn extra commission on phone bookings.

TripAdvisor Marc Charron, managing director for Europe, presented TripAdvisor’s perspective of the changing travel customer at the event.  Thomson will be working closely with TripAdvisor and a number of other user driven content sites in the future – as customers demand independent reviews and the opinions of travel peers when making their travel choices. TripAdvisor content will be included in the Thomson site by the end of the year. 

In May Thomson added a free text search powered by Google which makes it quickly and easily possible for customers to go straight to a particular hotel, villa or type of holiday. This provides Thomson customers with new freedom of how they move around the Thomson site and access the wealth of information and content.

View the full online booking report by clicking on one of the links below

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