Mobile bookings are a challenge for the hotel industry. Even as traffic on mobile continues rising to never-before-seen levels, conversion rates on mobile aren’t quite keeping up.
What are the stats, and what exactly is affecting conversion on mobile? What are the reasons that mobile bookings aren’t quite stacking up against mobile traffic?
Let’s take a look.
The Story So Far
It’s important to put the rapid growth of mobile into context, especially for more recent arrivals to the workforce. Here’s a brief history of Google and Mobile:
How is mobile comparing to desktop, worldwide? Smartphones passed PC shipments in Quarter 4 2010, and yearly Smartphone shipments are expected to exceed 2bn by 2020.
For most of us, our phones are with us morning, noon, and night – many of us even sleep next to our phones, and use them as alarms! They feel indispensable to modern life, and in many ways, they are.
E-commerce is not the most recent arrival to the mobile world, but it is one that isn’t adapting as quickly as other areas. Reasons for this range from the technology available to a certain reluctance to make luxury purchases on mobile.
How can we overcome this, and help mobile hotel bookings increase to match levels of mobile traffic?
The Picture in Hospitality
Here’s what our own data, aggregated across hundreds of hotel clients, shows:
- Mobile traffic exceeded desktop traffic in Quarter 3 2015
- Mobile traffic exceeded 50% of traffic in Quarter 3 2016
- Mobile traffic increases from 50% midweek to 65% on weekends, with desktop traffic sharply dropping, suggesting people are doing significant amounts of research in work
The percentage of mobile transactions, however, continue to lag significantly behind levels of traffic.
Industry wide, almost 2 out of 5 mobile shoppers have abandoned a travel booking on mobile due to poor user experience (study by Jumio). Booking abandonments on mobile represent billions in lost revenue annually.
Why are mobile bookings so much lower than mobile traffic? There are a few reasons.
