Smartphones are increasingly becoming the device of choice for people, even more so when we are talking about travellers. Thanks to the increasing number of mobile devices and their processing capabilities, we are observing a big strategic shift in industry towards mobile. Brands have to sell where the customers are and online advertising companies like Criteo have to keep a sharp eye on the industry trends to offer the best to their clients.
Daniele Beccari during his session at WIT Conference
Criteo recently published a research report for travel industry after analysing more than 1 billion bookings generated online since 2014. During the recently concluded WIT Conference in Singapore, Daniele Beccari, Head of Travel, Criteo shared some useful results they derived after analysing the data.
According to the report, share of mobile devices has now risen to 23 percent of bookings as compared to 12 percent last year. the fraction of users searching and browsing on mobiles is higher but for complicated travel bookings, desktops dominate. The rate of adoption is much higher in case of Southeast Asia as compared to Europe and Middle East.
More people book hotels and accommodation on mobile phones as compared to Rail or Airline tickets. The car rental segment is growing fast on mobile as well seeing a growth from 18 percent to 25 percent.
This trend has been observed because airline bookings usually add up to higher amount and people prefer mobile devices for smaller amounts and this holds true for most markets except Japan where the average booking values are almost same across all the devices. This to some extent, is because of the easy adoption of technology in that region. The car rental segment is catching up on mobile as most of the rental companies are relying heavily on their mobile app.
People tend to book long travel plans using desktop and mobiles account for small fraction of bookings there. But according to Criteo, 21 percent of bookings aren’t correctly measured by advertisers as the click is made on one device while the transaction is completed on the other. Of course the trend is different in case of last minute bookings where mobile devices dominate the scene.
Travel marketers need to track the users across multiple devices to offer relevant information to them and facilitate the booking process. In-app tracking can also help generate meaningful data and drive more bookings from the app only.
The full report can be found here.
‘The Mobile Opportunity’ session was conducted during WIT Conference 2015 which was organised as a part of TravelRave. You can read rest of the stories from TravelRave here.
