At the so-called “traditional” end of the intermediary world is the much-maligned but still relevant travel agency.

Yes, numbers of agents, shops and call centres have fallen dramatically over the past 20 or so years, but equally many have survived and evolved.

But to what extent have some of them evolved, by introducing technical or online features to their service? Or not, as the case may be…

Web call specialist Talkative recently examined almost 150 traditional travel agency websites in the UK.

The company obviously has a motive to get people to use its click-to-call tech, thus the benchmarking test, but some of its findings are fairly interesting in terms of the tech state of the travel agency market.

Each of the agencies had a consumer-facing website, although less than half (45%) took online bookings for products.

Almost all had a phone service and 55% of the companies were operating solely as call centres.

Interestingly, 55% of the agencies had a web chat facility available for visitors to their websites, with a 72% success rate for getting a response.

At the marketing end of things, just a third visibly used YouTube and videos to help showcase their services and products.

Technically, Talkative found there was much to do for many websites in terms of page efficiency.

The average website took four seconds to load and was around 3.4MB in size, shifting to 1.4MB and 4.4 seconds for product pages.

NB: Travel agency image via BigStock.