Failure to turn browsers into buyers – online travel booking

A report from Ve Global indicates that there are far more travel browsers than travel buyers. The report shows that the dropout rate is as high as 95.5% when it comes time to paying online for a travel service.

The data, advertising and marketing technology company’s report shows that every sector of the travel industry is plagued with massive on-site abandonment.

Across all travel content sold online in the Asia-Pacific region, 92% of all bookings were deleted at the checkout stage.

These findings are based on 58 million customer sessions between January 2017 to April 2018 and were part of a wider Ve study into online customer behaviour in the APAC travel industry.

Asia’s travel agents are the big losers when travellers browse their sites. A massive 95.5% of their potential customers abandon their online bookings before the payment stage, leaving travel companies with a meagre 4.5% success rate.

A similar, although slightly better, performance applied to hotels with a 90.4% drop out rate. Airlines suffere a 91.6% dropout rate according to the report. Vehicle hire companies have a 88.9% failure rate in converting would-be bookers at checkout.

Companies offering a low-cost service such as coach and ferry rides performed slightly better converting just over 20% of active traffic into real bookings.

Comparisons between countries showed Australian travel companies turned more browsers into bookers with a relatively low 82% dropout rate, when compared with the Asia-Pacific average.

In contrast, Japanese customers were the hardest to snare with 93.76% leaving their online baskets without completing a sale.

The data also revealed customers in APAC complete more online travel bookings using their mobile devices than in any other region globally.

Almost a third (30%) of all travel bookings made in the region were completed using a mobile or tablet device. This compares to 29% of bookings in the United States, 28% in Europe, and just 13% in Latin America.

Ve Global APAC managing director, Jamie Pierre says, “increasingly, APAC travel companies are allocating vast sums of their marketing spend to attract customers online, only to lose them during the booking process. Travel companies should pay close attention to the growing use of mobile devices in completing bookings and ensure they offer a multi-channel approach.”

SOURCE: PR Newswire