The future for direct retailing of travel and tourism products: the influence of information technology

Today, rising quality of information delivered to the remote terminal and the decline in the cost of the means have made direct purchase of travel and tourism products by electronic media a practical possibility. Middleton (1994) identifies the following methods of directresponse marketing: direct mail; telephone/tele-marketing door-to-door distribution; travel related exhibitions; and interactive TV. The last was, at the time Middleton was writing, the only significant form of electronic direct selling (he had Minitel in mind) and it is this general field, in its present and expected future forms, which may revolutionise the way travel products are sold (Taylor, 1995), and which this paper is about. The phrase direct (ie principal to customer) electronic retailing (to distinguish it as sold to a consumer, rather than eg through EDI to an intermediary) has been coined to describe this. The research reported here explores the prospects for retailing by principals to end customers by electronic means, and the implications for the industry of this. It reports the results of a survey of senior people in the UK travel and tourism industry and its suppliers, carried out in 1995.