It does seem to be the case since, according to the new Ipsos-Reid study, 59 percent of the Canadians with Internet access say they have used the Internet to gather travel information and 18 percent have used the Internet to make an online booking.

The study goes even further as it says that 92 percent of the 18 percent who have ever booked travel online are now using travel agents less because of the Internet.

But let's not overreact to these figures. Indeed, the study only involved 1,500 telephone interviews with Canadian adults (before correction) and only 59 percent out of these 1,500 respondents had Internet access, which reduces the Internet population to 885 people. Inside this panel made of 885 people, 18% had ever used the Internet to make a booking, which means 270 people of respondents. According to the Ipsos-Reid study, these 270 people
would be a representative sample of …3 million Canadian adults.

This study also specifies that 26 percent of those who have not yet booked travel online plan to do so in 2001, which means that 6 million Canadians would use the net to book travel by the end of 2001.

As might be expected, the favourite site of online travel bookers in Canada is Aircanada.ca (29% of online bookers say it is their favourite site), which is hardly surprising when you know how important the offline market share of the Canadian company really is.

Air Canada is followed by Travelocity (11%), Westjet (6%) and Expedia (5%), according to the data that was collected for 5 months by Ipsos-Reid in September 2000.

Source : IPSOS-REID