A leading travel expert says that airline passengers in the UK are increasingly resorting to booking flights online since they claim that the levels of mobile phone customer service needs to improve.

Industry sources have quoted Gerry Samuels, founder and executive director at Mobile Travel Technologies, who made a remark that UK travellers still considered their mobiles primarily as a search device while organising their trip abroad.

While addressing delegates at a conference, Gerry Samuels said, "If you look at Japan, which is accepted as being a few years ahead of us, in 2006 it reached a tipping point where there are more people accessing the internet through mobiles than PCs."

He added that the people of Japan "are out and about making travel bookings" since they have readily available 3G networks. He said that things in UK would change only if the levels of service improved.

Wikitude, a revolutionary piece of mobile phone software is set to turn the mobiles of the country into guidebooks. For instance, the software will take a picture of a building in front of the user on their hand-held phone. Once the image is worked on, the phone would be able to give the full details of the building, which the user is looking at.