Why the SMB travel industry needs SAAS based technology

The travel industry is a tough market with ever increasing distribution costs and lower margins, no wonder the SMB segment - small/mid-size tour operators/agencies are having so much trouble. And to add to that antiquated technology makes it even tougher. This market in-order to survive the influx of OTA's/larger suppliers have to improvise in their product offerings by becoming more specialized and becoming more technology savvy. These players have to understand that putting together very specific packages and being destination focused would help them increase their sales volume, instead of becoming part of the me-too crowd, they need to focus on their products. Why I think Sofware As A Service is great for small/mid-size markets : because it bring them on par with their technology-savvy counterparts. Everyday when I speak to these companies I realize that they struggle with technology (or lack of), constantly focusing on infrastructure, booking engine, technical support staff rather than understanding their product growth path and scaling up sales volumes (or even provide more custom and better customer service).
Software As a Service (SAAS) makes it so much simpler, there is no need to budget for hosting, technical support staff and it's cheap. The pay as you go model makes it attractive as the spend can grow with volume. How does it work for the technology provider? what's in it for the technology company? its simple, with the advent of virtualization/cloud environment, low hosting costs, low hardware and deployment costs, Technology companies can implement much attractive multi-tenant solutions that provide great features. Where instead of dealing with every customer's specific needs and very specific workflows, SAAS solutions focus on making this more standardized and pre-canned workflows that enable these SMB players to focus on their core business. In addition the ease of integrating apps like google apps which it so much easier to manage your corporate core needs at such low hassle technology.
Over years my own company has shifted using a lot of core infrastructure support products to hosted solutions where we don't have to deal with maintaining it (everything from email/support ticketing process to finance/hr solutions) SAAS makes so much sense for a small operations. By judging the feedback I am getting on our own SAAS solution (Rezopia), I am quite sure that this is the way to go!