Have computer will travel — online bookings soar

CHICAGO — Marquita Hynes turned to online travel after a co-worker kept raving about the benefits of going it alone in trip planning. Now she can reel off her own list of Internet travel coups.

Train fare from Chicago to New York and back for $33. A hotel suite in Austin, Texas, for $26. Round-trip airfare to Denver for $100. And she's just gotten started.

"If you can pack up and go away for the weekend, you can get some really impressive deals," the 41-year-old Chicagoan said.

Consumers are taking to the Web for their bookings in sharply higher numbers, driven online by airline fare wars, high-speed Internet connections that make shopping easier and the tantalizing notion that, just maybe, a jaw-dropping bargain lies only a mouse-click away.

More than 35 million Americans purchased travel online last year, up 17 percent from 2002, according to the independent travel research firm PhoCusWright Inc. Nineteen million more researched destinations or prices there, the company said.

This year the Internet is expected to generate nearly $53 billion in leisure travel bookings alone — nearly 22 percent of the travel industry's revenues, according to a projection from Forrester Research.

"Online travel is incredibly robust; it is stronger than we expected it to be," said Henry Harteveldt, a Forrester analyst in San Francisco. "There are a lot of incredible deals right now."

Jeffrey Katz, chief executive of Orbitz Inc., the Chicago-based online travel agency, forecasts even more dramatic growth ahead thanks to a newly intensified airline competition. Low-cost carriers are expanding to new routes and adding more planes, forcing bigger rivals to slash transcontinental fares in response.

"If you've flown from the East Coast to the West Coast or checked out prices to Florida, it is a bloodbath, with high fuel prices, new capacity in the marketplace, new lower labor costs" at major airlines, Katz told analysts recently.

Airlines may be facing their toughest year financially since 2001 because of the stiff competition, he said. But in the online travel business, "these kinds of prices, as long as it's a safe travel environment, are stimulative to the marketplace for those of us who thrive on strong volume," Katz said.