Online travel bookings to double in five years

The number of travel bookings made online in the Middle East is set to “more than double” in the next five years, said Walter Lo Faro, director of market management, Middle East & Indian Ocean for Expedia.

Lo Faro estimated that currently around 20 – 25% of travel transactions in the Middle East take place online, but he said the market was showing an “impressive speed of growth” as travel suppliers, travel agents and tour operators cater to a growing demand from consumers to book travel online.

“The Middle East is slightly slower on this development but it’s getting there – and especially I would say in the past 24 months the speed of growth in terms of Middle Eastern users actually making bookings online has been growing exponentially.”

Despite this, Lo Faro said there were still “no immediate plans” to launch an Arabic language or local version of Expedia.com in the Middle East.

Expedia launched its sister website Hotels.com in Arabic two years ago. “Expedia is slightly more complicated while hotels.com is basically a hotel bed bank, so that is disproportionally easier to launch,” said Lo Faro.

There are currently more than 70 Hotels.com sites worldwide, while Expedia has launched in 20 different countries.

“We always start with hotels.com, in every country, we make it work for a few years and see what happens and then according to the results we decide whether an Expedia site is the one to be launched or not.

“You have to fine-tune quite a few things here especially when you launch an Arabic site," he added. "You have to figure out the language, the boxes don’t go in the same place, its quite challenging and complicated.

"But you never know it pretty much depends on how we will grow in the future.”