APAC travellers’ window shopping addiction

By Alexandra Coulton

We love online window shopping.

We spend hours filling our carts with a ludicrous number or items we know we don’t need only to give ourselves a mini-heart attack when we see the total and quickly exit our web browser.

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Apparently, travellers like doing this too, but with online bookings.

Data from advertising and marketing tech company Ve Global has shown that on-site abandonment – where a customer fails to complete a booking online – is a regular occurrence for the Asia Pacific travel industry, with 92 per cent of all bookings lost at 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 per cent of them abandoning their online booking.

Although performing better, hotels (90.4 per cent), airlines (91.6 per cent) and vehicle hire companies (88.9 per cent), are also failing to convert the majority of would-be bookers at the checkout phase.

In terms of countries, Australian travel companies do the best job in turning browsers into bookers with a relatively low 82 per cent abandonment rate.

Woohoo, go us!

At the other end of the scale, Japanese customers looked to be the hardest to convert with 93.76 per cent 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 of all travel bookings made in the region were completed using either a mobile or tablet device.

This compares to 29 per cent of bookings in the United States, 28 per cent in Europe, and just 13 per cent in Latin America.

Do you have something to say on this? Get in touch with Travel Weekly Editor Ali Coulton here to share your thoughts.

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Email the Travel Weekly team at traveldesk@travelweekly.com.au

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