Carlson Wagonlit Travel has been looking at its flight data to uncover patterns, identify segments and assess the financial impact of behaviour.
By looking at more than six million air transactions (accounting for 1.8m people) in 2014, the travel management specialist revealed the following:
- Female travellers book earlier than male travellers on average - a difference of 1.9 advance booking days between men and woman.
- Advance booking increases with age so between the ages of 30 and 70, advance booking increases by about five days for both men and women.
- With travel frequency, advance booking goes down, with a gap between the advance booking behaviour of men and women higher with those taking less trips a year but almost disappearing in those who take more trips per year.
CWT has also put a cost on the booking behaviour to reveal a difference of $17 ( or 2% of the average ticket price) by comparing prices paid by the two genders.
The company has done the maths to highlight potential savings of just under $50,000 for companies with 1,000 business travellers rising to $1m for companies with 20,000 employees in the sky. Beyond gender and advance booking, this method can be extended to other types of traveler segmentation and other areas of travel management.
CWT says the methods used to crunch the data can be applied to uncover behaviour of other types of travellers as well as in other areas of travel management.
Separately, the travel management company has revealed some numbers on mobile hotel bookings, via its CWT To Go app, showing a 20% increase each month since launch about a year ago.
In addition, some clients are recording 15% of hotel bookings now being made via mobile. Flight booking functionality is being tested with planned launch later this year.
The advance booking behaviour findings are part of a white paper which can be found here.