Travel agents will have to adapt to the advent of the Internet and online booking, or die, the winner of the Eircom Ennis Information Age Town best practice award says.
Leo Mannion, of Tom Mannion Travel of Ennis, said the 50-year-old company, which employs 20 people, has turned to e-commerce because the days of the travel agent as a middleman are numbered. The independent travel agent now depends on higher volume business, due to lower profit margins from lower air fares. "We were conscious of the threat that the Internet was posing to middle people, agents, brokers of all shapes and sizes," he says.
In a two-year programme, the company is investing £40,000, 30 per cent of which was received in grant aid, in developing two Internet sites, one for booking holidays abroad, the other as an inbound tourism operator specialising in golf tours.
With 4,600 of the town's 6,000 households having personal computers, Ennis has a 68 per cent PC penetration, the highest of any community in the world. "We wanted, as an experiment as much as anything else, to see how much online business we could do." However, people's habits change slowly and many in the area still prefer the traditional face-to-face contact. "We were pleasantly surprised by the amount of business from the east coast of Ireland. People seem to be doing their browsing at work," he says.
The company, which has a £500,000 turnover across its businesses, has a low domestic Internet usage. "That will form the efforts of our focus for the next 12 months." But the Internet-generated inquiries for the inbound business are running at about 20 per cent. "It is an ability to peruse travel and holiday offerings which will in turn lead to a booking. We are getting an awful lot of enquiries."
The irony of a travel agent winning a trip to Silicon Valley as the Best Practice Award prize is not lost on Mr Mannion, although "the charms of upstate California appeal".
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