Newly released PhoCusWright research finds that the European travel market is the world's largest regional travel market in gross bookings and grew from €224 billion in 2006 to €237 billion in 2007. Online bookings for leisure and unmanaged business travel accounted for €59 billion, or 25% of the European travel market in 2007.

PhoCusWright's European Online Travel Overview Fourth Edition projects that online travel is expected to continue its double-digit growth, but will decelerate significantly as the market matures. Online leisure and unmanaged business travel is likely to expand to nearly €91 billion by 2010. Several factors will drive online growth:

- Scandinavian OTAs are expanding their relatively low market share.
- The tour operator segment will finally drive significant growth of online products.
- Regional OTAs are trying to gain first-mover advantage in new markets.
- The hotel segment will slowly gain a larger share of the online pie through consolidation and larger investments in easy-to-use technology and marketing.
- Rail's piece of the online travel segment will grow as online rail ticket distribution will almost entirely be driven by rail provider Web sites, rather than OTAs.

Key findings include:

• Online bookings for leisure and unmanaged business travel accounted for €59 billion, or 25% of the European travel market in 2007.
• European online travel growth is lulling into maturity. Growth rates exceeding 50% are now history in the - European online travel market as even the least developed markets, Spain and Italy, only increased online revenues by 35% in 2007.
• Traditional Airlines will start to exceed LCC growth online. While LCC online growth is rapidly slowing due to longstanding online success, traditional airlines are expected to experience a lesser slowdown in growth for the next few years.
• Countries like Portugal and Greece currently have low user penetration- in the range of 35-40%- but with a population exceeding 10 million inhabitants, they offer the strongest future growth potential for online travel.
• U.K. and Scandinavia, the two most developed markets in the region, now have the lowest rates of online growth in Europe.
• The European rail segment offers comparable total travel time, less security hassle, convenient station - locations and less environmental impact, making it a direct competitor of LCCs.
• Tour operators are gearing up. They have strong brands and new technologies which may enable them to become true competitors for OTAs in the online market in Europe. Contrary to all other supplier segments and OTAs, the tour operator segment is going to increase its growth rates substantially in the coming years.