Online travel agents provide information about various destinations and travel needs including airport information, air travel, hotels, and car rental. Their main services include bookings for air travel, hotels, and car rental. In order to use their services, you need to provide personal information as well as a login and password.
The online record can save time when booking a flight, a hotel, or a car. Instead of keying in payment information, users can simply login and pay by confirming the credit card of choice. In addition, users can also specify a departure airport, preferred airlines and travel preferences (for example, lowest price, shortest flight time, lowest number of connections). From time to time, users may also receive special offers that are not available to customers of other travel agents.
By providing personal information to an online travel agent, you gain potential benefits but lose some extent of privacy. The impact on your privacy depends on the online travel agent’s policy. Since the online travel agent retains all customer information, there is a chance that customer information may have errors or, after a certain period of time, become outdated. Further, the online travel agent may use customer information for other purposes, such as analyzing the customer’s web-usage patterns. Finally, it is possible that unauthorized persons (intentionally or unintentionally) get access to the personal information stored in a portal.
Consider a selection of online travel agents that differ in their privacy policies and the benefits that they possibly provide. All of the portals ask members for the following personal information during registration: