Introduction:

In this book let we are going to over the Travel Industry Mesh-up with the Internet to provide a background of where it came form and a forecast of where the industry is going to provide you the #1 way of increasing your Occupancy and increasing revenues. This book will also provide an informative piece for academic study and research for the tourism industry.

Chapter 1

History of Travel, Hospitality, technology, travel agents, online travel agents,

&  Online booking engines

Now that Travel 2.O has been around for a while we are going to be crystallizing the effects. First a overview.

Travel 2.0, was used as early as December 2003 on a posting on the Planeta Web 2.0 Discussion Forum and is an offshoot of the Web 2.0 phenomenon. Like many other industries, the online travel industry is currently in transition, adapting to new technologies and trends available on the Internet.

Travelers, for their part, are becoming increasingly more interested in finding the opinions and reviews of their fellow travelers in lieu of professional travel advice.

This impact is significant given the travel sector’s economic influence on the Internet; indeed more money is spent on travel than anything else online. Roughly two-thirds of Americans research and plan travel online and approximately the same amount book online as well.  The online travel industry breaks down into several different categories: online travel agents online travel guides, online travel planners, and online travel communities and forums. Together, these four groups make up the bulk of what are considered Travel 2.0 companies. In this book we are going to discuss these in detail and more importantly explain the technology that allows this to happen.

Travel 2.0 is a term that represents the extension and customization of the concept of Web 2.0 into a form that applies to the world’s largest industry: Travel and Tourism. It defines a transformation on online offerings into a new level of user empowerment and functionality. More than “Move to the Internet” as a platform, though, it is about how business forces that characterized Web 1.0 are yielding power, influence and eyeballs to the socially oriented Web 2.0. For Web 2.0, Tim O’Reilly described the following new models or different approaches that illustrated the divide between 2.0 and 1.0.