The internet has become inseparable from everyday life - 68 per cent of Germans were online in January 2010. The internet is becoming more and more important for travel planning: Almost all Germans online who travel use the internet for their holiday planning, two-thirds have already booked online. During their information search online, Germans’ orientation is provided primarily by known destinations and brands, either through direct entry of web addresses or with the assistance of search engines. Web 2.0, with all its varying interactive possibilities, is also playing an increasing role in travel planning – the most important information sources here are reference websites, traveller recommendation and travel review platforms.

Seán Taggart, Chairman of the Coach Tourism Council (UK) and Owner / Managing Director of the Albatross Group, in a recent press interview, stated that as the coach tourism industry moved to attract new customers, it needed to utilise a much wider range of communication tools and that this would increasingly focus on the internet, e-mail marketing, e-brochures and social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. New customers would not always be on a traditional mailing list and would often be used to looking for and buying a wide variety of goods and services online. That was why a strong and broad online presence was going to become increasingly important. Coach holiday operators needed to decide whether their online presence was going to include full online booking or just be another very attractive shop window which would still require customers to contact the operator to make a booking. In the UK, for example, many coach operators of all sizes were generating between 10 per cent and 25 per cent of their bookings through pure online bookings, with no human intervention at all. Others had very good generic websites that did not yet accept online bookings.