The most popular way of planning a trip earlier was to visit a travel agency to get your itinerary made. Besides direct hotel reservations, the Central Reservation Systems (CRS) and Global Distribution Systems (GDS) thus served as the primary channels of sales for hotel room nights.

The emergence of the secondary and tertiary cities led to an aggressive increase in hotel development and provided avenues for expansion of hotel brands, which were previously dependent on new opportunities in just the five main cities.