More and more Germans book their holidays online. In the year 2006 the turnover in terms of holiday trips booked completely ore at least partly over the internet increased to 8.5 billion Euros which is a plus of 18% compared to the year 2005 in which turnover was just 7.2 billion Euros. These figures were reported by the German Association for Information Technology, Telecommunications and New Media (BITKOM).
For 2007 another increase by 18% to 10 billion Euros is expected. In the past year out of a total of 127.1 million trips booked about 30 million were booked completely or partly online in Germany which means that more than one quarter of all holiday trips were organized over the internet. This trend is set to continue. For 2007 BITKOM forecast 35.1 million trips booked online. Back in the year 2005 the number of trips booked online was just 24.8 million and back in 2004 even just 20.9 million.
Another important issue is so-called dynamic packaging which means that instead of booking some ready-made standard holiday package customers pick their individual combination of flight, hotel and rental car over the internet. Availability and prices of these individual packages can then be immediately checked online. In the meantime many travel agencies offer such dynamic packaging on their websites. According to BITKOM the number of customers for such packages is going to increase very much over the next years.
The above figures were established on the basis of a survey carried out by the GfK Panelservices market research institute on behalf of BITKOM. 