Travel agents vs. online booking : tackling the shortcomings of nowadays online tourism portals

In this paper we present the findings of a study that aims at identifying the reasons that let many people still rely on traditional travel agents instead of booking their trips online. The prime motivation for investigating this issue is that it is impossible to have direct experience with the product prior to consumption in the domain of tourism. The Internet provides a powerful environment for the creation of virtual representations of tourism destinations allowing indirect experience that greatly surpasses the possibilities of traditional travel agents. However, the results of the study show that social interaction with travel agents, their expertise and the possibility to save time on search can be of even higher importance. So, we derived the "best of both sides" and suggest the application of an established methodology in the area of multi-agent systems, namely 3D Electronic Institutions, to the tourism domain in order to satisfy the growing demand on human assistance related to online inquiries and to offer customers cutting-edge visualization facilities.