Over the past decade and half, seldom has a month gone by without a form of news heralding the demise of the retail travel agency business. CNN reported that there are about 13,000 travel retail locations presently in the United States, down from a peak of 34,000 in the mid-1990s.

Every month, the number of travelers who look for information on their mobile devices is more than 30 million in the UK alone (as a small sample from a developed country)