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Hotel bookings made by secretaries belong to the past

June 17, 2009 | Online Travel

The increasing use of so called self-booking tools has led to more and more business travellers booking their flights, hire cars and hotel rooms themselves quite independently of any central booking service, reveals a new hotel.info study.

Who cannot visualise the times when the boss asked their secretary to book a hotel room for a forthcoming business trip?

Even today this situation certainly arises in offices but much less often than before as has been shown by an online survey conducted by hotel.info amongst its more than 1.1 million business travellers.

The increasing use of so called self-booker tools such as hotel.info has led to more and more business travellers booking their flights, hire cars and hotel rooms themselves quite independently of any central booking service. The advantages to the traveller in using decentralised reservation services are immediately obvious. The booking can be made efficiently and quickly thus saving both time and money.

The hotel.info study showed that the majority of users of business travel websites are male. About three quarters of all hotel bookings made through hotel.info are made by men either for their own business trip (the majority) or for female colleagues. The remaining bookings are made by women which divide into two almost equal parts: where the reservation is made for another female colleague; or for their own trip. Altogether female travellers only make up a small proportion of the total bookings - 18% - demonstrating that less than every fifth business traveller is a woman.

Warini Munshi - Managing Director at hotel.info hotel booking Ltd UK : “The result is actually rather surprising. We certainly knew that there are generally more male than female business travellers but the actual percentage is something new. We believe that in consideration of the huge customer base of more than a million business travel bookers at hotel.info that the end result presents an accurate picture of the actual situation”.

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