That's the word from Forrester, a high-falutin' research outfit.

The whole report costs a whopping $279 (although you do get instant access), but here's the Executive Summary (emphasis added):
The number of US leisure travel Bookers — online travelers who use the Internet to both research and buy travel — fell 9% from 2005 to 2007. Fortunately, thanks to the overall growth of the online population and the increase in the number of trips that the remaining Bookers take, as well as the amount of money they spend on travel, online leisure travel spending has increased 41% in three years. What we're seeing is an early warning signal: Fix the problem, or else. To keep online consumers interested in online booking, travel companies need to overhaul their systems to sell the way people want to buy. They must proactively destroy — and then rebuild — their products to be more practical to sell online and humanize the digital experience that they offer on their Web sites.

So much for all that talk about how the Internet is going to put travel agents out of business!

This doesn't surprise me because I've been predicting something similar for a while now. The example I like to use is a doctor friend who made an extremely good living and yet he'd spend hours online trying to shave five bucks off an airfare. Why? Well, perhaps because the Internet is a novelty and there is something fun about the process of trying to "game the system."

I then like to point to a PBS documentary about the first transcontinental auto trip in 1903. The guy who did it suffered an unbelievable number of hassles and whenever the car broke down (which it did frequently and often far from anything resembling a garage), he had to crawl under the vehicle in the mud and fix it himself. He was a doctor, too! And the automobile was the must-have, gee-whiz gizmo of its day. Can you imagine any doctor today repairing his own car?

So it's not surprising that, as the novelty wears off, more and more people who can afford to travel (which almost by definition means people who are relatively well off) are finding better uses for their time.

I'd also like to mention that "humanize the digital experience" is an oxymoron.

You can make a digital experience flashier, easier, or quicker, but you can't make it "human." There's only one way to humanize an experience and that's with a human being. And I can't help pointing out that home-based travel agents are human.

(Although there was one agent I bumped into at the seafood buffet on that last cruise . . .)