Internet makes travelling cheaper and easier than ever

London: Over the last 10 years the way we travel has been revolutionised by the web. Many of us waved goodbye to high-street travel agents, newspaper classifieds and hours spent staring at endless Teletext pages, and logged on to new hi-tech services.

As the web began taking hold of the public's imagination, the burst of sites and services began shifting the way we thought about travelling, making the idea of grabbing a bag and jetting off cheaper and easier than ever.

In fact, the swell of activity in the travel industry seemed so lucrative that it was one of the cornerstones of the dotcom boom.

The boom itself may have ended ignominiously, with many of the individual names crashing spectacularly, but our approach to travel itself remained irrevocably altered.

Britain's travel revolution circled around a pair of innovations that had the web at their heart.

First was the ability to search for what you wanted. In the days before Google, web search was a limited business that was finding its feet. In the mid to late 1990s, a number of sites realised that they could offer a clear way to cut through the jumble, underpinned by vast amounts of information going through computerised reservation systems such as Amadeus and Worldspan.

Joining up those dots may seem obvious in retrospect, but it was a revelation at the time.

Low-cost airlines

Second was the ability to buy low-cost plane tickets online. The low-cost airline model itself wasn't new — it had already been pioneered by American operator Southwest in the 1970s and then closer to home by Ryanair in the early 1990s.

But combined with the deregulation of the European airline industry, the idea went stellar once the web began to find a firm footing with customers. The easy-to-use self-service websites cut out every middleman and let people explore in a way they hadn't done before.

How many of us spent hours weighing up the options of a two-week break in far-flung destinations in corners of Europe we'd never heard of, let alone visited?

In both cases, the benefits were not only clear to customers, but they made sense to businesses too — whether it was a package tour company shifting the last few spaces, an airline making sure it got bums on seats, or a hotel selling off empty rooms on the cheap.

Dynamic pricing

The internet opened the door to dynamic pricing — customising prices to individual consumers or fluctuating demand in the market. "I think it was a combination of exciting new pure play web startups like us and traditional players like easyJet offering unbeatable deals online," said Martha Lane Fox, who started Lastminute.com in 1998 with Brent Hoberman and continued as its managing director until 2003.

She said the way the internet increased competition and helped push prices down was pivotal in the travel revolution — when holidaymakers realised that using the web to book a trip directly could prove significantly cheaper, it then became difficult to ignore the idea.

"This then forced all the big players online and the pricing advantage to buying online meant customers had to look," she added.

It's easy to think that the pressure to push prices downward was the only impulse that drove the success of travel on the web — but there have been other factors at work.

People also discovered that (with access to the right tools) it was often better to do the job of finding a flight and hotel themselves.

Websites that count

Lastminute

Many of the gaggle of British travel websites that launched in the late 1990s are long-forgotten. Lastminute, though, lingers thanks to the way it coincided with increasingly impulsive travel habits. Bought by rival Travelocity in 2005, it was possibly the most important site of its kind to emerge from the UK.

Expedia

Now the world's leading online travel company, Expedia started life as an experiment from a company not usually given credit for its internet smarts — Microsoft. Spun off in 1999, and purchased by Ticketmaster two years later, it remains the pioneering travel site thanks to its efforts at trawling vast databases of information.

EasyJet

Offering up deals on its website, the service took a swipe at big rivals like British Airways with cheeky slogans like ‘the web's favourite airline', and made it possible for people who had never considered stepping foot outside Britain to jump on a plane and see the world.

Tripadvisor

The rise of the user-generated web put power back in the hands of the people — and none more so than this site, which remains the number one source online for user reviews. Now owned by Expedia, it has its quirks.

Couchsurfing

What began as an experiment by a student (who emailed 1,500 strangers at the University of Iceland to find a bed for the night on a trip to Reijkyavik) has now turned into a huge ‘hospitality exchange network'. No other site quite captures the communal spirit quite like Couchsurfing.

VRBO

Holiday swaps and owner rentals are dicey, but sites like VRBO (Vacation Rentals By Owner) and Homeexchange.com helped pioneer a kind of peer-to-peer holidaymaking.