2 August, 2004 Guardian Unlimited by Guy Clapperton. The great e-scape.

More people are visiting holiday websites than ever before, according to new research. So is it just because of the wet summer, or is the net now the only way to book travel, asks Guy Clapperton.

It’s so tempting to start a piece on the holiday industry’s performance online by asking whether readers are enjoying the summer weather, but somehow this year (so far) that would seem cruel. It’s been very wet and unseasonal and there’s no point in claiming otherwise; this might in part explain claims from the online research company Hitwise that June 2004 saw more people visiting holiday websites than any previous month, January this year having held the previous record.

According to Hitwise, the industry accounted for 4.16% of all visits online during June, and it enjoyed a 23% increase in visits compared with June 2003. The destinations and accommodations sub-sector increased the most, boosting its market share of visits by 33%. The most popular terms typed into a search engine over a 12-week period leading into June included “easyjet”, “ryanair” and generic terms such as “cheap flights” and “cheap holidays”.

It’s not just the outreach that’s making the sector grow, however, it’s the fact that customers are coming back more than they have done in previous years. There are a number of reasons for this. Ian Wheeler, managing director of e-travel, which sells the technology that underpins many online travel sites across 90 countries - some of the best known in the UK are Opodo, Travelink, Qantas and Air France - points to some of them: “Booking online is about economies of scale and trust - the more people try online the more people are comfortable.”

This means more people will book, so more profit is made and more money can be thrown at advertising the online site. And, of course, the online booker’s experience is improving by degrees. “If you go on to Opodo and search for a fare between London and Sydney you’ll now get 200 fare options, and some options are options you’d never dream of if you were working out your cheapest price - or you can pay a slightly higher price but get something convenient. Then you go on to hotels and you get a vast array of hotels, you get maps, you get pictures, you get a lot of data.”

The quality of the information has improved as well as its quantity; you can book in five minutes or in five hours depending on how much data you want to sift through. “If you look at the offline booking experience it’s really no longer comparable,” says Wheeler. External factors are also important, he adds.

Alain Portmann, founding director of the internet advertising agency WebLiquid, points to email: “It’s a very powerful communications channel. Companies who get it completely right - Expedia do it quite well - use a lot of resource and technology in deploying a good campaign. Email is the most intimate relationship you can have with a consumer online.”

Anyone who has researched flights over a period of time will be aware that this sort of confusion happens. That entails segmenting the customers properly, which involves doing some hard work - but this has advantages in its own way.

Vanessa Kent, corporate development director for ValueClick Europe, which sells some of the web technology that goes “under the bonnet” to extract marketing data from customer behaviour, says the data on offer from a customer’s clicks is much more sophisticated than ever before. “When you look at the marketing data in relation to an email you can do a lot with the technology to try and track a different user - there’s all kinds of information on what they’re doing, what they’re searching for, what their preferences are, and then combined with media you can deliver a really targeted, preferential email to that user with exactly what they want.”

It is perhaps not a surprise that, once the inhibitors such as patchy web availability are eliminated from the equation, travel will grow more quickly than anything else; it will be instructive to watch and see whether other industries can follow its impetus.