Bookassist and Google Show Mobile Revenue Opportunity At BTO Florence

Bookassist
March 21, 2019
bto11_2
Bookassist’s focus on mobile booking is paying off for its hotel clients with double-digit growth in direct booking revenue generation on mobile year on year.

Figures were presented by Bookassist CEO & Founder Des O’Mahony as part of the company’s ongoing monitoring of the mobile landscape. The keynote presentation was a joint presentation by Google, Bookassist and Travel Tripper on the opening day of the BTO event at Florence on March 20.

Google’s Furio Gianforme painted a picture of a rapidly expanding mobile opportunity in travel, with Generation Z users moving increasingly towards ecommerce and mobile infrastructure improving worldwide to deliver faster content. Steffan Berelowitz of Travel Tripper showed statistics from the USA market highlighting in excess of 50% of traffic to hotels now coming from mobile devices, despite revenue lagging significantly at closer to 25% of all revenue being generated via mobile.

BTO11 Des O'Mahony

 

Device versus User-Behaviour Impact

Bookassist figures for its core European markets are part of a series of studies that Bookassist has presented since 2016. Comparing mobile traffic in 2018 to mobile traffic in 2017 across all markets, involving over one thousand hotels and hundreds of thousands of hotel reservations, Des pointed out that there is now an equilibrium being reached between mobile and desktop traffic. While still growing, mobile traffic is inching upwards far less now than two or three years ago. This is likely due to the fact that mobile platforms have now become “stable”, since devices are now relatively uniform, all have large screens and all have good network access. The rapid growth seen in 2015 onwards initially was driven by improving technology that has now become the norm. This device-related change is now less pronounced.

BTO11 Mobile Revenue Growth

On the other hand, Bookassist figures for revenue generation on mobile in the same period continue to show double-digit percentage growth, with desktop continuing to decline universally. This is likely to be more user-behaviour related. Users are becoming much more comfortable and confident with mobile commerce, and increasing numbers of younger people who already see mobile as the norm are moving into the workforce, into income generation and into online spending patterns. Des proposes that while mobile versus desktop traffic may reach a relative equilibrium, growth in mobile revenue can be expected to continue for some time yet because of this evolving user behaviour.

Bookassist’s industry-leading V10 Mobile platform has captured this opportunity for its client hotels, with clear growth in average booking value and conversion for those customers using the platform.

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