Travel marketers spend a huge amount of time trying to get
people on to their brand’s booking channels but should they instead spend more
time improving these channels? A new white paper suggests that closing the loop
is the most profitable thing marketers can do
For every customer that makes a booking on your site, it is
highly likely you have already digitally encountered them. That’s the
conclusion of EyeforTravel’s new Understanding the Travel Consumer’s Path to Purchase
white paper. It looks at real purchase data from more than a
quarter of a million consumers across five countries and found that three
quarters of consumers will visit and then leave a travel site, before coming
back to it to complete their purchase.
The research looked at Online Travel Agency (OTA), airline
and hotel verticals, tracking the 15 sites a consumer looks at before they make
a purchase. OTA sites were visited between 73% and 78% of the time before
conversion, airlines between 69% and 84%, and hotels between 69% and 70%. This
suggests that all types of travel brands should aim to convert these visitors
first time and optimizing their sites so that consumers don’t feel the need to shop
around.
This is particularly the case for hotel brands, as the white
paper finds that their conversion rates lag noticeably behind airline and OTA
desktop conversion rates in Brazil, India and Germany. Furthermore, across all
geographies both airline and hotel brands have substantially lower conversion
rates for mobile bookings in comparison with OTAs.
“Reportedly, travel purchases in Q4 2016 had an above
average abandonment rate of 82%,” said Alex Hadwick, Head of Research at
EyeforTravel, “and I think that this research reinforces the importance of
getting the fundamentals right so that rate reduces. Travel brands need to get
their own-brand site right across all devices because this is one of the most cost-effective
ways of driving better profitability, especially as, typically, half of users
will abandon a site if it takes more than two or three seconds to load.”
EyeforTravel and Jumpshot tracked more than a quarter of a
million travel purchasers across five countries through clickstream data and
consumer surveys to build a picture of the path to purchase. The white paper
details the how, where and why of the decisions people make before they book,
and identifies what travel brands should be doing to capture market share.