Roger Keenan, managing director at City Lifeline, said: "It's worrying to hear that such a large percentage of users and IT managers are not entirely confident that their disaster recovery plans would kick in, should their IT fail."

Keenan added, "Chances are, that most travel companies have well established and secure disaster recovery plans in place, but their CIOs have failed to communicate these plans to their users, who as a result are unclear as to how these would operate and what they should do during a disaster."

The travel sector survey comes after a recent disaster recovery into the preparedness of public sector SME suppliers. That research SME businesses supplying the public sector lacked confidence in their backup and disaster recovery strategies, with nearly a third (30 percent) stating they would face substantial risk of downtime in the event of a serious incident or disaster.

The survey questioned 380 SMEs across the UK and 12 other countries. It was conducted by the Ponemon Institute on behalf of data security firm Acronis, and revealed that over half (53 percent) of public sector firms are failing to make disaster recovery (DR) a sufficient priority.