Online Travel Booking Industry: Penultimate Need Is A Mobile App

Online Travel Booking Industry: Penultimate Need Is A Mobile App If you have been observing closely, you would note that there has been a substantial rise in the number of travel bookings made through mobile apps. With just a 2-3% market share in the travel industry, today mobile based bookings have grown to a whole 25%. Online travel has truly reached its height with maximum books in U.S. alone being done through mobile devices. You will see that by the end of this decade alone, mobile bookings will make desktop bookings almost obsolete.

Of course, you cannot have mobile bookings go up without really transforming the mobile technology significantly to support the UI design needs, and the UX needs posed by the end user. IF the user experience is not something worth talking about, you are definitely losing it. The complete understanding of the mobile consumer and how they consume content through this device is necessary if you are planning to increase your base on this channel. Another aspect that you as a business most often leave out understanding the traveller demands within this new medium. How does the visitor stray to your mobile site? One is he was navigated to the mobile site, and the second reason could be he deliberately entered your mobile site.

For most businesses the need for a mobile app comes with typical changes in the technology they have been using till now. You simply cannot compete in a crowded market without understanding your consumer. For long, OTAs and B2C companies have incorporated JavaScript and HTML tags to drive in “Google Analytics� which is the basis for them to understand the reason for the traffic, know what their competition is doing, and understand the gap that still exists.

Why is Google Analytics important for the mobile driven consumers? To understand whether they are new visitors, retargeted visitors, or some of them have visited your site already. Most businesses use the medium of web traffic analysis to their other distribution channels such as mobile, tablets etc. What you need to understand is the different channels work in different ways, and you need to either develop different mediums to analyze them or, create an omni-channel method to make this analysis possible.

Why Analyze Omni-Channel?

The world is changing, and there is a paradigm shift in the way travel is being consumed at all levels. A lot of businesses have launched their mobile app, which has led to an increase in traffic from this stream. The website traffic has not reduced as a result, which means you cannot stop analyzing the traffic coming from the website. There has been a shift from the visible JS/HTML world to the difficult to track JSON world in the API segment, which calls for better tracking and monitoring facility that can help understand changing trends, demand, product availability and the conversion rates, thus giving the travel business a better idea of how they should pursue further. The different channels offer different user experience, and are comparatively different from each other. The expectation from the different channel also differs, which means you need to ensure a similar experience across the multiple devices.

Your users could be using a second screen, which calls for tracking and monitoring their activities through these different screens. Interaction with the customer is also important. They would need mail, phone and sms reminders on their travel plans and confirmation of their booking.

You need to understand your consumers’ needs and offer products and services accordingly. It is important to offer them things that they consume, or are planning to consume.

How Challenging is Tracking Transactions occur from all segments, which calls for analyzing and tracking all these segments. It is not just the booking that should be considered as transaction. There is more to a transaction than just booking. Search requests, visits, their consumption of the travel data etc. are also transactions which are logged within the website. It is important to track the incoming, and outgoing traffic across the multiple channels. Analysis is bigger than just simple logs of few transactions done through the website. It is important to understand what all needs to be included in analysis, and eventually track all the data that comes into this list. It is complex and complicated and requires a script that can manage the different gateways.

The time has come to understand how mobile apps are changing the whole travel dynamics, and how the second screen consumer is consuming travel. Tracking this consumer, and knowing the behavior will help develop relevant content.