A Google survey shows that U.S. mobile users opted to use browsers over mobile apps when they book travel.
For example, 52% of business travelers who booked hotels on their mobile devices did so through a browser while 21% booked overnight accommodations through their mobile apps, Google says.
For what Google terms “personal,” or leisure, travelers, 52% of mobile bookers used browsers to book or reserve hotels while only 11% used mobile apps, according the survey.
The browse-over-mobile-apps pattern holds true for all travel categories, according to the survey, although the disparitybetween browser and app use narrows with ooking bvacation activities.
For example, 25% of business travelers who booked vacation activities on their mobile devices did so through a browser while 20% booked vacation activities through their mobile apps.
For personal travelers, 25% who booked vacation activities used browers on their mobile devices while only 10% used mobile apps, according the survey.
Does this mean app developers should packl it in and travel companies should focus exclusively on building better mobile websites?
Not necessarily.
The numbers may be skewed because not all hotels or vacation activity vendors have viable mobile apps, so in some cases opening up a browser may be the only or best option for some travel bookings from mobile devices.
On the other hand, a focus on mobile websites could make the browser option even more attractive.
How that plays out remains to be seen.
Gathering travel research is probably the most frequently used function on mobile devices in the travel planning and booking process, according to the survey.
The survey found, for example, 44% of business travelers and 31% of personal travelers planning cruises used their mobile devices to look for travel information about cruises; 18% of business-traveler and 9% of personal-traveler cruisers used their mobile devices to book or reserve cruises; and 21% of business-traveler and 8% of personal-traveler cruisers used their mobile devices to “check-in” for their cruises using location-based services such as Foursquare or Gowalla.
Another major finding in the Google survey, “The Traveler’s Road to Decision,” is that travelers are increasingly uploading videos of their trips.
In a previous survey, conducted in 2008, “only 4% of travelers reporting uploading a video from their past travels in the previous six months,” Google says.
In the current survey, 9% of personal travelers uploaded travel video in the past 6 months in 2010 and 6% uploaded travel video in 2009.
For business travelers, 23% uploaded travel video in the past six months in 2010 and 16% did so in the prior two months in 2009, the survey found.
“As online video grows in popularity, not only more travelers are viewing them throughout the travel planning process, but they are uploading travel-related content as well,” the survey says.
That means suppliers and intermediaries of all types should allocate some resources to develop or acquire video content.
That’s not an earth-shattering conclusion, but the survey supports it.
To reach its findings about travelers’ online behavior, Google’s survey polled 5,000 U.S. online users who indicated they were business or personal travelers in the second quarter of 2010.
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Dennis, can you disclose what apps were used to actually book the vacation activities? I can’t think of any apps that actually support in-app booking using credit card or other means. Are there new ones that have come out that support in-app bookings?
Stephen: I’m asking Google about your vacation activities apps question. However, wouldn’t it depend on how you define vacation activities. For example, might not a concert or a sporting event be a vacation activity in some instances? You might be able to book those with mobile apps, right?
Stephen: Google didn’t ask the interview subjects which apps they used to book vacation activities. But, Google spokeswoman Sandra Heikkinen points to numerous mobile apps that might handle various types of vacation activities. For example, she cites DisneyWorld Wait Times, Wikitude, Yelp or Around Me (if we’re considering eating to be a possible vacation activity), HearPlanet and UrbanSpoon.
Stephen, what say you?
I think this is one of those self fulfilling surveys. Google is not as dominant in the mobile space as other sectors. So it stands to reason that the results would favour browsing over apps.
So with Apple clearly framing the mobile world – rightly or wrongly – I believe that Cuppertino is the leading influencer in mobile. Today it would seem to be more logical that Apps are actually more important to the those who are more heavily mobile than others. Rim could have had this position but they don’t. True Android may be the leading seller of devices at the moment but much of the Android functionality is just to run the phone.
What we really need to see is how the usage stacks up again the real world of users.
Cheers
Completely agree. Google’s entire business is based on search, so no shocker that’s the results they’re publicizing. I rarely use search on my phone.
Glenn – not to disagree on your comment, but just to provide another data point, I always use search on my phone – in particular when I am travelling and not at my desk.
Agreed — Google has a vested interest in this kind of news, but i must say that the browser works anywhere, and will be the first choice for a long time.
It is interesting to know what is the split between the mobile operating systems that were used by the people in the survey.
While iPhone users may have an App they can use to book almost any kind of activity, there are a lot less such apps available to Blackberry or Android users (not to mention other phones). My guess is that between those users that actually had a choice which form to use, the results are very different.
Hi Dennis,
Do you know when the study was conducted?
Cheers
Sasha: As I wrote in the story, “To reach its findings about travelers’ online behavior, Google’s survey polled 5,000 U.S. online users who indicated they were business or personal travelers in the second quarter of 2010.”
My opinion is that at this stage there are no well known, all rounder, easy to use travel apps, so the most intuitive action for users is to open a browser and go to their favourite online site (or default to a search engine).
I absolutely don’t buy into Erez’ opinion – BB has had plenty of useful apps forever, and Android has all the necessary ones less the crapware.
Any chance to get a link to the full survey?
“52% of business travelers who booked hotels on their mobile devices did so through a browser while 21% booked overnight accommodations through their mobile apps”…. and the other 27%? call?
Daniele: There’s no link for the survey. Sorry. The other 27%? I don’t know. It looks like browsers and apps were the only possible choices.
Hi Dennis – sorry for beating a dead horse here but I can’t seem to find any info about this 2010 survey other than your write up. Any ideas on how to gain access to it? Thanks, Sarah
This is a case of a self-fulfilling prophesy. The majority of large travel companies, particularly the major hotels (e.g. Marriott) have opted for the mobile Web for bookings. Those that do have downloadable apps have a multi-step process that makes it no easier to book than the mobile Web. I don’t view this as a preference by the consumer but a strategic decision by the industry to promote bookings over the mobile Web rather than launching a native app that reduces the steps in making a reservation through stored data on the phone. As HTML5 becomes the norm, more Web apps will have native type of functionality making the whole issue a moot point. The question then becomes, why have a downloadable app? If the app can provide unique functionality, speed the booking process by storing preferences, and provide a more personalized, situationally relevant to a hotel’s best customers it will be used. If the goal is to simply recreate the Web on a mobile device, with the emergence of 4G networks and HMTL5, the mobile Web will do the job for standard booking only capability
Norm, I agree mostly, but I’m not sure that I’d say that using the mobile web was an “industry strategy”. I seems more that many companies used a “platform” approach based on the promise of write once-deploy everywhere and keeping their costs low while “embracing” the new channel. Turning to such platforms is typical of ‘early-days’ adoption cycles where organizations don’t have the “specialized skills” and there is not enough accumulated experience to help define best practices.
Secondly, at the time that many travel organizations built their first generation mobile presence, there was really only one platform — Apple — that provided an app path and the majority of users had feature phones. The landscape has changed dramatically with the entrance of Android, RIM’s new BB6 OS and to a lesser extent Palm…all of which now embrace an app strategy. Plus it seems as we’ve reached a tipping point where next year smartphones will outnumber feature phones, accelerating the shift in companies’ mobile strategy.
But I too am a big believer in HTML5 and agree that the advent of 4G networks support a robust mobile web experience. But I don’t think that we should discount the advantages of being able to utilize the unique capabilities of a specific smartphone (local storage, integration with phone address book and perhaps NFC — yes, it was me, the NFC skeptic, who just said that), which largely are unavailable in a pure mobile web environment.
Glen,
I am in total agreement with your comments. The strategy I referred to was the ability to reach multiple platforms at a lower cost especially without the internal mobile expertise. The ironic aspect of this is that the majority of browser activity is on smartphones, so deploying this strategy to reach full feature phones is less a factor as providing a better interface for smartphone browsers. I still believe there is a place for downloadable apps within the context of HTML5.
Thanks for your comments.
Of all the companies with interesting browser and mobile app related usage data, Google would have the most; so why bother surveying 5,000 people asking them what they claim they do or did over looking into actual data on internet behavior and extracting some really useful travel technology trends. I can understand companies without the data doing surveys to get some PR, but Google could have made a much bigger splash and with a lot more substance if they shared some insight into what travelers are really doing online rather than what what they claim to be doing.
Since search of some sort is the start, why would an app from one provider have any real value?
Whatever the tool, I want it to end the booking by putting the result, automatically, into my smartphone calendar and/or store it in some other way.
Now that WOUDLD be userful and perhaps something an app would do better?
DD: interesting perspective. One company that could do that very, very well, is precisely Google through the Google Calendar and Android synch. I have to admit, it works beautifully.
Daniele: – true, but personally I’m not a “cloud” fan and I like my information in my devices. What I’m looking for is something that delivers the calendar update direct into my device – like Infuzer or the other similar service that was around whose name now escapes me. And probably delivers the entire booking record as a document of some kind. Don’t want to be messing about browsing to find it every time – that is where an app might have some advantages.
……….. but equally I don’t want a plethora of apps, one for each airline, OTA, hotel chain etc.
But then maybe the miracle of HMTL5 will fix all that????
Dennis, in response to your comment “The numbers may be skewed because not all hotels or vacation activity vendors have viable mobile apps …”, I noticed that two different, but very comprehensive travel apps were released this month since you wrote this article. The VA Tourism App was released Friday and is the first state-wide mobile travel guide. Kurtz-Ahlers & Assoc., a hotel rep. agency, released a free destination app that provides users with access to the company’s portfolio of worldwide, luxury travel destinations.
Do you think the travel industry is just slow to develop really great, useful apps? I can see the attraction of having every resource literally at your fingertips.