This week, the Travel Industry Association of America (TIA) and USDM.net are jointly issuing the travel industry's most insightful research survey about how travel consumers use the Internet. The report, Travelers' Use of the Internet 2005, shows that the Internet continues to rapidly grow as a dominant channel for both reaching and transacting with today's travel consumers.

While this year's results show that the number of Americans using the Internet (120 million adults) appears to have reached a plateau, those who plan and book trips or vacations online continues to climb rapidly. A majority of online travelers (78 percent of respondents, or 79 million Americans) turned to the Internet for travel or destination information in 2005 - much higher than the 65 percent of online travelers in 2004.

Survey findings also indicate that online travelers are booking more online.
- 82% (64.8 million) of online travelers book online
- 78% of online travel bookers do at least half of all their travel booking online
- 34% of online travel bookers make all of their travel purchases online

With so many Americans planning and booking their travel online, TIA and USDM.net expanded a survey category in this year's research to better gauge how consumers respond to the various forms of Internet-based marketing communications.

Of particular interest to marketers is the section of the report that shows that the most effective online marketing techniques that trigger a consumer response are not the often ballyhooed "paid media" channels (such as pay-per-click search listings, banner ads, pop-ups and email), but rather the "interactive marketing" communications such as unsponsored search engine results (36 percent); e-mail recommendations by friends or colleagues (34 percent); links on Web sites (26 percent); and opt-in e-mails or e-newsletters (21 percent). The top four most response-effective communications are all strategic tactics that savvy online marketers practice daily.

Other trends and data to emerge from the Travelers' Use of the Internet 2005:

- More than nine out of 10 online travelers said they used the Internet to plan a personal trip last year, and a quarter of trips planned online were related to business travel;

- Almost half of online travel planners also use destination Web sites - such as those maintained by convention and visitor bureaus - to plan trips. In addition, one in three online travel planners checks one or more Web sites and then calls a toll-free number for more information;

- Today, 34 percent of online travel bookers claim to make all of their travel purchases online. Importantly, nearly eight in ten online bookers (78%) use the Internet to do at least half of all their travel booking.

USDM.net is pleased to co-sponsor and contribute to this year's TIA research report and recommends that all online travel markets purchase and study this report. For more information or to purchase the full results of the Travelers' Use of the Internet 2005, visit the TIA.org web page at http://www.tia.org/pubs/pubs.asp?PublicationID=57.

Posted at 06:06 PM