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Europe’s travel market took a hit in 2009. According to the most recent “European Online Travel Overview” by PhoCusWright and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC), total spending on nonbusiness travel was an estimated €214 billion ($300 billion) for the year, down from €239 billion ($335 billion) in 2008.

These losses were limited to offline channels, however. Online sales fared far better, rising 0.4% to remain at about €68 billion ($95 billion).

As a result, the Internet accounted for about one-third of European spending on leisure travel in 2009, up from 28% in 2008.

Despite this healthy rise, Europe still lags well behind the US in the proportion of non-managed travel revenues realized on the Internet. Online transactions were expected to contribute at least one-half of the US total in 2009, according to earlier projections by PhoCusWright.

One reason that online travel spending in the European region has not kept pace with US spending is that consumers’ habits have varied widely among countries in Europe, according to PhoCusWright and PwC. While an estimated 44% of all leisure travel by UK residents was bought on the Web in 2008, the proportion was much lower in Germany (24%), Spain (19%) and Italy (14%). The average across the European countries surveyed was 28%.

Similar variations were seen in specific sectors, such as sales of airline flights. Here too the UK topped the table, with an astonishing 71% of spending on flights taking place online in 2008. In Scandinavia (considered as one entity) the Web claimed an estimated 50% of airfares, compared with 44% in Germany, 31% in Spain and 28% in Italy. The European average was 43%.

Overall, figures from the report suggest that during 2009 Web users in some European countries may have been more likely to plan travel on the Internet than their US counterparts. For example, 60% of survey respondents in France said they went online “always” or “often” to compare travel prices, while 56% researched accommodation and 54% used the Web to choose a destination.

By contrast, Ad-ology Research found that relatively low percentages of US Web users ages 18 and older went online to investigate travel-related subjects in 2009. Airfares were the most popular travel-related topic, with 34% of respondents saying they had recently checked out flight costs online. But less than 31% of Internet users said they had searched for information on rates and availability at hotels and motels.