USA Today has a fun series on the top 25 things in various categories from business to science to...travel. For the Travel sector, USA Today notes online booking, TSA, and e-tickets as the top three "pivotal changes" in travel.
My feeling is that online travel still has a *lot* of innovative stuff left to take root in the online landscape. As with much of the internet - indeed with many business aspects of the world - the key challenge is *credibility*. We still count on marketing laden, advertisement driven information sources (e.g. the internet) to drive our exploration into products. As people become more comfortable and sophisticated in surfing and companies realize that marketing is no substitute for a quality product, it could usher in a new era of "consumer transparency" where business will compete on the basis of objective quality measures as determined by a well-informed social media audience ranking every aspect of the business.
Yikes - that's not gonna happen anytime soon?!
