单选题
Penny-pinching consumers and fierce price wars are
bad news for the travel industry. Bad, that is, for everyone except the booming
on line travel giants. Consider the sharp rebound of such on-line players as
Travelocity and Expedia. While they suffered in the wake of the September 11th
terrorist attacks, with bookings off as much as 70% in the weeks that followed,
business has snapped back. "The speed with which those businesses bounced back
surprised even the people most bullish about the sector," says Mitchell J.
Rubin, a money manager at New York-based Baron Capital, an investor in on-line
travel stocks. The travel industry's pain is often the on-line
industry's gain, as suppliers push more discounted airline seats and hotel rooms
to win back customers. And many of those deals are available only on dine. At
the same time, on-line agencies rely primarily on leisure travelers, where
traffic has rebounded more quickly than on the business side.
The two biggest players, Travelocity Com. Inc. and Expedia Inc. , are locked in
combat for the top spot. Both sold some $ 3 billion worth of travel last year,
though Expedia topped Travelocity in the fourth quarter in gross bookings. And
thanks in part to a greater emphasis on wholesale deals with suppliers, Expedia
is more profitable. For the quarter ended in December, Expedia posted its first
net profit, $ 5.2 million, even with noncash and nonrecurring charges, compared
with Travelocity's $ 25 million loss. The airlines' latest cost
cutting moves may only spur the on-line stampede. Major carriers are eliminating
travel agent commissions in the U. S.. That could lead to growing service
charges for consumers at traditional agencies, driving still more travelers to
the Web. Jupiter Media Metrix is predicting that on line travel sales in the U.
S. will jump 29%0, to $ 31 billion this year, and to $ 50 billion by 2005. About
half of that is from airlines' and other suppliers' own Web sites, but that
still leaves plenty of room for the online agents. This growing
market is drawing plenty of competition and new players. Hotel and car rental
franchiser Cendant Corp. snapped up Cheap Tickets last October. Barry
Diller's USA Networks Inc. bought a controlling stake in Expedia. And a group of
hotels, including Hilton Hotels and Hyatt Corp. , are launching their own
business this summer to market hotel rooms on the Net. Is the
field too crowded? Analysts and on-line agencies aren't worried, figuring that
there's plenty of new business to go around. But, for now, the clear winners are
consumers, who can count on finding better services and better deals on
line.
单选题
We can learn from the beginning that the competition in the travel
industry revolves chiefly around