If last year's received wisdom was that business-to-consumer (B2C) ecommerce failed to hit the mark, this year is about to prove everyone wrong. While retail, betting and gaming struggle to find their web niches, online travel is experiencing dramatic success - and the traditional companies are the winners.

Online sales of airline tickets, car rental and hotel reservations was the single largest ecommerce sector globally in 2000, according to Forrester Research. Researcher IDC put the value of online airline ticket sales at $7bn last year, a figure expected to increase significantly in 2001.

US online hotel and accommodation bookings topped $2bn last year, while renting cars over the web is now a billion dollar business in its own right.

In the UK, online travel revenues are predicted to total a more modest £3.7bn by 2005, which is still 14 per cent of all bookings in the sector.

The good news for established businesses is that Ebookers, Travelocity and Microsoft's Expedia will face serious competitive threats from old guard companies British Airways, Virgin and Thomas Cook.

"Travel represented the low hanging fruit in terms of B2C ecommerce," said Jaap Favier, research analyst with Forrester. "Like the insurance industry, the travel sector was essentially digitised to begin with - a paper ticket or policy is needed, but everything else can be done electronically."

Airlines, hotels and travel agents have traded for many years through electronic data interchange (EDI), amassing terabytes of data.

"While startups were attracted by the digital nature of the travel sector, established companies could exploit their data and the economies of scale available to them in terms of distribution," said Favier, adding that it's the same business effect that has seen off so many internet retailers.

The early success of companies such as Travelocity and Expedia was due, in part, to the slowness of many airlines and hotels to react to the internet, but now startups realise that the real value of B2C isn't in offering cheap tickets, but in value-added services.

Established players with strong brands find this far easier to achieve. "As a result, we will see many internet travel startups go bankrupt," Favier predicted.

Some 40 per cent of the companies Forrester contacted claim over 100,000 unique visitors a month, with 15 per cent claiming over 500,000, yet most firms had to confess online bookings represented less than 10 per cent of the total.

Most travel companies are optimistic: Forrester found that 26 per cent of firms thought online bookings would account for half of all bookings by 2005, and nine per cent thought all bookings would be made online.

But to build on its success, the travel industry must improve its understanding of consumers' booking habits and change their sites to address consumer sales, warned Joshua Friedman, senior research analyst with IDC's e-travel programme.

Forrester found that 57 per cent of UK travel firms don't collect any customer data at all, a third don't require registration, and 43 per cent were not able to predict how many visitors they'll have in two years' time.

Favier said that customer relationship management (CRM) software will become increasingly important in travel and the B2C sector as a whole, as ebusinesses realise that creating a base of established, affluent customers is key to long-term revenues.

"B2C ecommerce requires all companies to offer multi-channel CRM," said Favier. "It's far simpler for established firms to offer different incentives to customers who interact with them through a call centre, a website or a branch office."