04th December 2024: Here are some of the stories that caught our attention over the week with some of our takeaways.
Criteo’s Consumer insights from around the world: This truly global report has some fascinating insights into booking window variation by traveller location, regional differences in travel preferences and booking behaviours, year over year changes in booking methods in APAC and EMEA, factors influencing travel choices and more. A few insights from the report below:
Travel Planning Time: EMEA and APAC travellers spend more time planning their trips, particularly for accommodations, compared to those in the Americas. Travellers in EMEA take about 20% longer to book flights than hotels, averaging 8.7 days for air travel and 10.5 days for hotels. In APAC, the difference is even more pronounced, with travellers taking an average of 16.4 days to book accommodations, compared to 6.9 days for flights.
The Americas exhibit shorter booking windows, with a faster drop-off in the time it takes the slowest 25% of travellers to book. This highlights the importance of urgency in marketing during peak booking times in this region.
Booking Channels and Influences: Mobile bookings are on the rise across all regions, particularly in APAC, where the share of flight bookings completed on mobile devices increased by 4% year-over-year. This trend underscores the growing importance of mobile-optimised booking platforms.
Online travel agencies (OTAs) experienced a decline in bookings across all regions in September 2024, while supplier bookings remained stable. This might indicate a growing preference for booking directly with airlines or hotels.
Booking Window Variations by Traveller Location: European and APAC travellers tend to have longer booking windows than travellers from the Americas. European travellers spend approximately 20% longer booking flights compared to hotels. For instance, the slowest 25% of European travellers take around 33 days to book flights and 38 days for hotels. Similarly, the slowest 25% in APAC need about 53 days to book accommodations, far exceeding the 27 days it takes them to book air travel.
American travellers, in contrast, generally exhibit shorter booking windows, with a faster drop-off among those who take the longest to book. While the slowest 25% of American travellers take around 30 days to book flights, this is 4 days longer than the time they take for accommodations. This difference emphasises the need for travel marketers to emphasise urgency during peak booking periods in the Americas to capture travellers with shorter planning horizons.
Changes in Booking Methods in APAC and EMEA- Year over year: Rise of Mobile Bookings: Mobile devices have become increasingly popular for booking travel in both regions, particularly in APAC. In September 2024, the share of flight bookings made on mobile devices in APAC surged by 4 percentage points year-over-year. EMEA also witnessed a rise, with mobile flight bookings increasing by 4 percentage points.
While Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) previously held a strong position in the travel booking landscape, they faced challenges in both APAC and EMEA. In September 2024, OTAs across all travel verticals experienced a more significant decline in indexed bookings compared to the same period in 2023.
A mom and son with tech roots at the University of Washington launch trip-mapping startup: Geekwire reports that their product Viata lets users enter the city they’re visiting, sites and destinations for their trip, and then generates a map plotting potential hotel options and travel times between lodging and locations. Users can select whether they want to get around via car, mass transit, bikes or walking.
While this is as much a story of mother and son, they do solve for a problem that all of us face when visiting a new city for work, shipping children around for a game or project or just sightseeing. Doing this exercise on Google maps would take ages! And although the product is in its early days, I’d love to see it go further. Who knows though, what competition and monetisation prospects look like…
Amadeus Reveals its Travel Trends for 2025: This report by travel giant Amadeus paints a picture of a travel industry evolving to meet changing consumer demands. Some of the key themes identified include nostalgia, personalisation, unique experiences, Asian travel resurgence, and the desire for authentic connections as key forces shaping the future of travel.
One theme in common with the Criteo report is the Asia Uplift which I want to call out with some key insights.
- Inbound and outbound travel to and from Asia in 2025, most significantly China, is expected to reach pre-2019 levels. This comeback is highly anticipated, as China was the world’s most valuable source market for tourism in 2019. Domestic travel in China has been booming in 2024, but outbound travel is still recovering.
- To attract foreign visitors, China has extended visa-free inbound travel until the end of 2025 for numerous countries, including Australia, New Zealand, Poland, and France.
- Etihad is expanding its wider Asia network with the launch of flights between Abu Dhabi and Singapore from February 1, 2025, and increased frequency of flights to Thailand.
- Thailand is predicted to be a popular tourist destination in 2025. Factors contributing to this include: Season three of the popular TV drama The White Lotus being set in Thailand, numerous luxury hotel openings, a new digital nomad visa, expanded visa-free entry for 93 countries, including China, India, the US, the UK, and the UAE as well as new tourism campaign that aims to attract 40 million international visitors in 2025, compared to 36 million in 2024.
- The airing of season two of South Korean TV series Squid Game is expected to further increase travel to South Korea. (although today’s news from the country will NOT help!)
- The 2024 show Shōgun has inspired historical tours of Japan, and seasons two and three have been commissioned. Expo 2025, taking place in Osaka, will also attract visitors to Japan.
- Over the next 15 years, the Asia-Pacific region will account for 50% of global air passenger growth, according to IATA. This is driven by a growing middle-income class population, with eight in ten households worldwide projected to enter the middle class in the next decade.
- The middle class currently represents 31% of India’s population. It is projected to reach 38% by 2031 and 60% by 2047. Markets such as India and Indonesia are also expected to see similar growth.
- The global share of leisure travel spending from people in the Asia-Pacific region is expected to increase from 29% in 2023 to 35% in 2025.
Google talks generative AI, voice and the future of search: This Phocuswright interview with Julie Farago, Google’s vice president of engineering for travel and local search, talks about leading a team of 700 engineers who handle two billion searches every day – 15% of which Google has never been asked before.
One of the key references was to visual search – moving on from text and audio. And she had this story about when she was walking down the street with her son and saw an unusual caterpillar. Wondering if it was an invasive species, she took a photo of it and asked Google Lens about it. The reply came back that it was a caterpillar typically found on beech trees – and guess what, they were standing under a beech tree! I found it a simple but powerful example of how search is shifting increasingly into the visual domain.
Update on Google’s compliance with the Digital Markets Act (DMA): Google appears to be caught between a rock and a hard place. In this blog update, Google talks about the impact of changes they have had to make ” While many of these changes have benefited large online travel aggregators and comparison sites, there’s a different set of businesses that are unfortunately losing traffic as a result: it’s now harder for airlines, hotel operators, and small retailers to reach customers. They have reported that free direct booking clicks are down as much as 30% since we implemented our original changes.”
And this highly critical post by a digital transformation consultant in 4Hoteliers.com seems to confirm the Google view that DMA might be harming hotels more than it is helping.
