Expected post-Christmas booking surge has not happened

Despite claims that yesterday would be the busiest day of the year for holiday bookings, travel agents have not seen a post-Christmas booking surge as predicted.

Website Hotels.com had stated that it expected internet traffic for holiday-searches to peak last night, based on trend data from previous years, as many people returned from their first day back at work since Christmas.

A Website Hotels.com spokesman said: 'We've found that traffic to our website peaks between Christmas and New Year.

'It's a time when people get bored of playing with their new presents and their thoughts move to a 2012 getaway to beat the post-Christmas blues.”

However, travel agents claim that although people may have started looking, they are not anticipating the peak booking period to arrive any sooner than the second week of January.

Head of Commercial at Advantage Travel Centres, John Sullivan, said: “There is a lot of advertising which gets people looking and researching but the days of most bookings happening on 26th and 27th December have long gone.

“A lot will depend on who’s working in between Christmas and New Year which is fairly mixed from our membership.

“We see it being similar to last year with our turn of year being the back end of the second week in January.”

Thomas Cook, TUI and First Choice all said that it was too early to see how booking had gone but that they too expected the surge to come in the New Year at some point.

Searches and bookings completed over the internet have increased due to the growing trend for multi-channel marketing, where larger companies use radio, TV and the internet to drive transaction volumes.

However according to independent retail experts, although online purchases are breaking records in many sectors of retail, they are pushing the prices down through aggressive discounting.