Online buying will never beat the shops

Buying online will never completely replace visits to the shops, Internet travel boss and rock legend Bob Geldof said today.

‘‘Offline travel agents will never go away because visits to the shops are such fun,’’ Geldof told travel journalists today.

But he added that Internet buying and usage was bound to grow - even his 87-year-old father was now a laptop enthusiast.

Having founded Internet travel booking company Deckchair.com, Geldof sold the business to World Travel Holdings of which he is now an executive director.

The Live Aid mastermind was giving a news conference shortly before addressing the annual convention of the Association of British Travel Agents in Lisbon.

He said: ‘‘Our business was doing extremely well up until September 11 but since then business has gone down.

‘‘We have a New York office and business just evaporated. Business is coming back, but it’s nothing like it was. There is a massive lack of confidence.

‘‘It’s not that people are panicking. It’s just that they feel down. The world is in a state of alert and people feel bad.’’

Asked if people felt secure about flying, he replied: ‘‘No.’’ But he added that he had no qualms about taking to the air.

He went on: ‘‘I would be particularly keen to go to America and particularly so if I could get a free flight on concorde.’’

He said that the events of the recent weeks in the travel and aviation industry had merely hastened the general shakedown that was likely to have happened anyway even without the terrorist attacks on America.

Geldof added that some online travel agents would disappear, as would some airlines and a clearer picture would emerge in about a year’s time.