A big chunk of travel customers from the Asia Pacific (APAC) region are leaving their shopping carts at the checkout stage. Exclusive data from advertising and marketing technology company Ve Global (“Ve”), has revealed that on-site abandonment – where a customer fails to complete a booking online – remains a critical factor for the APAC travel industry, with 92% of all bookings lost at the checkout stage.
The findings, taken from over 58 million customer sessions between January 2017 to April 2018, form part of a wider Ve study into online customer journeys in the APAC travel industry. The analysis includes a percentage breakdown of what devices customers are using to complete their online bookings as well as the best, and worst, performing travel sub-sectors for converting customers.
Travel Agents in the region face the biggest struggle to convert customers with 95.5% of them abandoning their online booking. Although performing better, hotels (90.4%), airlines (91.6%) and vehicle hire companies (88.9%), are also failing to convert the majority of would-be bookers at the checkout phase. The most clinical sub-sector in travel was reserved for the more low-cost options, with coach and ferry operators converting 20.2% of active traffic into bookings.
In terms of countries, Australian travel companies do the best job in turning browsers into bookers with a relatively low 82% abandonment rate. At the other end of the scale, Japanese customers looked to be the hardest to convert with 93.76% leaving their online baskets without completing a booking.
While abandonment still plagues the travel industry, the research did find APAC customers were far more receptive to forms of remarketing than their global counterparts. For example, APAC travel companies can expect to recover one online booking for every 18 remarketing emails sent, compared with the 23 that European companies must send out on average.
The data also revealed that customers in APAC complete more online travel bookings using their mobile devices than in any other region globally. The research found that almost a third (30%) of all travel bookings made in the region were completed using either a mobile or tablet device. This compares to 29% of bookings in the United States, 28% in Europe, and just 13% in Latin America.
Jamie Pierre, Managing Director at Ve Global, APAC, said: “Increasingly, APAC travel companies are allocating vast sums of their marketing spend to attracting customers online, only to lose them during the booking process. Although the causes of customer abandonment are varied, travel companies should pay close attention to the growing use of mobile devices in completing bookings and ensure they offer a multi-channel approach that meets the growing expectations of consumers.”
David Marrinan-Hayes, CEO at Ve Global, said: “Despite tenacious customer abandonment rates, there’s a massive opportunity to capitalise on potential bookers already showing a high level of buying intent through effective remarketing. The goal for APAC travel companies should be to anticipate and inspire customer decisions by delivering more relevancy, more context, and to create the right individualised experience at the right time.”
Learn more about the findings here:
