The year is 2020; driven by technology undreamed of today, the world of hotel marketing is unlike anything we can imagine. As marketers what will our role be? Will we have any role at all? If the changes in the last five years are any indication, these are wonderful questions to ponder.

Here in the present, we can safely say online marketing has come of age; if it was cutting edge yesterday, it's the norm today. But, what about the future? What can we expect, what do we have to do to be relevant to the consumers of today and tomorrow? Perhaps the only thing we can say for certain is that as long as technology continues to change at blinding speed, our biggest challenge will be just to keep up.

It is estimated that more than a billion global consumers shop online. For most of them it's nothing new, they've been doing it for years now. The Internet has been fully embraced, not by just the young but by everyone. Two-thirds of the 72 million Baby Boomers are online, about the same percentage as the following generation, Gen X. Many of the 60 million-strong Gen Y, our newest customers, have already ...