One percent. It's an amount that expresses the shot-in-the-dark, a remote possibility. But as the share of room reservations gar-nered by a hotel web site, one percent translates into millions of dollars in revenues. And rather than remote possibility, it promises certain and steady growth. Curiously, it's not the sort of growth many visionaries originally hoped the Web would provide. The Internet once was prophesied to be a replacement for global distribution systems (GDSs). That pronouncement some day may come to pass, but for now, GDSs remain firmly entrenched as leading reservations handlers. "There are still a lot of travel agents with green screen PCs," says Eric Christensen, president of European operations for WorldRes, San Mateo, California. "They have long-term contracts with GDSs. They're locked in because they were so successful."
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