Photo: Some of the most successful travel sites are well optimized for phone and tablet use.
While people do increasingly use mobile devices when they purchase travel plans, airline tickets, and the like, they are more often using browsers instead of apps to do that. What’s more, they are still using desktop and laptop computers more than their mobile devices.
What this says is that travel sites need to think about the way their websites are organized, and mobile optimized, if they want to be able to stay ahead of the curve.
Chances are, sites that are easier to read on mobile devices, which often use the same browsers found on laptops or desktops, are going to be the sites that generate the most income as an increasing number of people move toward using their phones and tablets instead of computers.
The report found that customers engage in a complex journey before they buy their tickets or reserve their rooms. “Travel has a long tail, with consumers passively consuming travel content for long periods and then actively researching airlines and hotels for less than two weeks … before they make a purchase,” the report says.
Many of the people who can afford to book flights and go on vacation can also afford to own both smartphones and computers, but that’s not always true. For many people, owning a smartphone is the cheaper, more efficient option. While a phone is more or less necessary to get by in modern society, if it’s a smartphone, it can do a lot of what a computer does. Tablets are a step above that, and for a lot of people they’re less work, and certainly cheaper, than having multiple devices.
Phones and tablets don’t display websites in the same way as computers, and so those websites need to be mobile optimized in order to make them a viable option for mobile users.
Even if a website has an app, going into a specific app makes it hard to check prices or offerings across multiple services, which most people are going to be doing when they’re planning a trip.