Exclusive data from advertising and marketing technology company Ve Global (Ve), has revealed that on-site abandonment - where a customer fails to complete a booking online - remains a critical factor for the Asia Pacific (APAC) travel industry, with 92% of all bookings lost at the 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.
Travel agents in the region face the biggest struggle to convert customers with 95.5% of them abandoning their online booking. Although performing better, hotels (90.4%), airlines (91.6%) and vehicle hire companies (88.9%), are also failing to convert the majority of would-be bookers at the checkout phase. The most clinical sub-sector in travel was reserved for the more low-cost options, with coach and ferry operators converting 20.2% of active traffic into bookings.
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 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 (30%) of all travel bookings made in the region were completed using either a mobile or tablet device. This compares to 29% of bookings in the United States, 28% in Europe, and just 13% in Latin America.
