Four years ago, booking online was already the cheapest way to organise travel. But what will the world of online travel look like in 2013?

A recent report from Forrester Research US Online Travel Forecast, 2008 To 2013 has a stab at guessing some of the key trends that will dominate Internet travel booking in four years time. While that forecast is necessarily US-centric, it does provide some interesting food for thought.

By 2013, the number of travellers directly researching and booking part of their trip online will have grown — but only by a relatively modest 16%. The main reason that number won’t grow faster, Forrester argues, is that travel sites aren’t good enough for many users, thanks to a combination of poor design, inflexible options, and unclear security.

Indeed, one of the growth areas will be in what Forrester describes as “leisure lookers”: people who use the Web to research and price their travel plans but then make their final bookings and payments offline. By 2013, one in five online travellers will fall into this category.

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