The massive growth in online travel agents and price comparison websites has caused great distress to their more traditional, high street-based competitors. The likes of Thomas Cook and Thomson are being challenged on their home turf by the enormous increase in the amount of cheap flights and budget holiday accommodation easily available on the Internet.
The advent of the credit crunch and the resulting global economic downturn, led to many people looking afresh at their household budget and changing the shopping and leisure habits of a lifetime. Grocery shopping increasingly took place at the cheaper supermarkets and marketing campaigns for the supermarkets changed to reflect this. The holiday habits of UK households changed as well, with people looking to save money without sacrificing their much-needed holidays.
They were greatly helped in this with the march of the budget airlines, offering cheap flights to short and medium-haul destinations that had previously been out of the price range of many people. When these low fares were combined with the ease of Internet searching and price comparison, they led to significant savings for hard-pressed families. They also caused a shift in the way people planned their holidays. Whereas before you would book a package holiday and let the travel agent sort everything out, now people were creating a tailor-made break, choosing the cheap flights that suited them and matching them up with cheap accommodation in the destination of their choice.
To the traditional travel agents, this inevitably posed a real and present threat. The costs and overheads associated with a visible high street presence are considerable in themselves, but maintaining a network of dedicated resorts and the means to get customers to them is also expensive. In most cases, old-style travel agents simply cannot compete with the more streamlined online alternatives.
Package holidays are also more vulnerable to the effects of currency fluctuations than the individual cheap flights and accommodation available on the Internet. With so many high street travel agents tied to resorts in the EU, the increase in the strength of the euro has been bad news for them, as UK holidaymakers decide against a fortnight on the Continent and opt instead for short European city breaks and a "main" holiday outside the Eurozone, such as the increasingly popular destinations of Turkey and Egypt. Such shifts have been easily accommodated by the providers of cheap flights - especially the low-cost airlines, who have added a host of medium-haul routes to destinations such as Turkey, Morocco and Croatia.
Kim has 4 years experience in the travel industry. She enjoys writing articles on various destinations and Travel related topics.