Millennials -- people who grew up in the 1980s -- travel differently than the rest of us, according to fresh research by Expedia, the online travel agency (OTA).
In a key finding, travelers under 30 years of age are much more comfortable making last-minute shifts in travel plans using mobile devices than the typical traveler.
The Expedia and Egencia survey, released today, cites 24% of millennials as saying that they have edited a trip on their smartphone at least once during a trip, compared with only 13% of travelers in the 46-to-65 age group.
Expedia responding to millennial tug
Millennials -- born between the early 80s and mid-90s -- are particularly of interest to Expedia UK and Ireland because they -- especially those living in the southeast of England -- disproportionately choose to shop with the OTA, said Andy Washington, managing director of Expedia UK & Ireland, in a phone interview with Tnooz.
Washington said that Expedia Traveler Preference, a program allowing a customer to pay at time of booking at Expedia or when they arrive at the hotel, now has 30,000 properties globally signed up -- with 840 of these in the UK.
In the stand-alone room night market among Expedia group brands, when millennials are offered the option of either agency or merchant, the preference in the UK is about 43% to pay at hotel on arrival. That's compared with the average traveler across Expedia brands, only 20% of whom choose to pay at the hotel when given an option.
"This group [of under-30s] is mobile and on the go and likes the flexibility of eleventh-hour planning," said Washington, who added that Expedia is the market leader in its net performer scores in brand awareness among millennials.
Day-of-travel focus
Post transaction, Expedia used to merely e-mail customers their boarding passes and hotel reservation statements. In many cases, that would be the last interaction between the company had with a traveler before a trip.
To attempt to interact with the consumer on the day of travel, Expedia is working on applications for Google Glass in anticipation of the technology's release. The app could help guide a customer from the taxi outside an airport to the exact gate for their departing flight, step by step.
For all of its customers, the OTA is moving toward communicating with its customers on the day of travel with a dynamically updated itinerary that can be accessed easily through mobile devices. Now when using Expedia's app, if a user is within seven days of departing for a trip, they'll be greeted by default with an itinerary screen rather than a booking tool, or "wizard."
This day-of-travel itinerary -- covering flight status, baggage carousel, and eventually weather reports and other immediate data -- becomes the focal point of communication. It particularly suits the preferences of millennials, who like to have real-time information on the fly, according to market research firm TNS, which contributed to Expedia's report.
The detail of information in Expedia's mobile product range is expanding, said Washington, to include offers for tours and activities, such as restaurant and theatre tickets when you're in a resort, with an increasingly intuitive use of map functionality for search.
Mobile is the focus of this effort, because mobile is where younger travelers are focusing. Only 18% of those under 30 haven’t used a smartphone for travel. This compares to 45% of the 46-65 year-olds polled.
Incidentally, the survey was conducted online from August 20, 2013 to September 12, 2013 across Europe, North America, South America and Asia Pacific by Harris Interactive among 8,535 respondents over the age of 18.
Expedia's technological plans
Millennials prefer to move beyond the "booking wizard" interface, which involves an "origin plus destination plus date" search, and move toward intuitive types of search options based on what the company knows about the traveler plus natural language search.
Expedia is working on responding to that challenge, said Washington. Expedia collects one petrabyte of data daily, and is aiming to use that information to better target customers.
Washington gives the following example. One of the biggest challenges is not to pigeonhole someone as a "business" or "family" traveler and only promote on that person's tailored Expedia page "business" or "family" results.
The research shows that millennials are more likely than previous generations of travelers to mix business and leisure on the same trip. Millennials are also more likely to extend their work trips to turn them into personal trips – and are twice as likely to do so when travelling alone than their counterparts over age 45, according to the report.
In response, Expedia aims for a subtle form of personalization to appeal to millennials.
It hopes to provide a mix of user-specific defaults, such as automatically assigning a window seat on a plane to a customer if that's his or her previously shown preference. More generically, relevant trends would be promoted in search results, such as by spotlighting trips that are currently popular with the user's demographic.
Expedia's goal is to look at the behavioral patterns it collects on customers, especially millennials, to better predict what the customer might like to see. Said Washington:
"For example, if we know you are traveling on a redeye from New York to London, we may know that you could, on that given day, save significantly by having a stopover at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport, where we also know that a customer to get a shower and a decent breakfast. Well, we could provide that relevant information, which our research suggests appeals especially with millennials."
Expedia will have to compete with social sources of information. Says the report:
In China, local OTA eLong informs us that Chinese travellers not only get recommendations from social networks like Weibo but also aim to build on their social network during travel. Jason Xie, COO of eLong notes the recent trend for “study trips”: trips organized by business schools or some industry associations for EMBA alumni or corporate executives.
Back-end technological changes by Expedia
Many of these changes have been possible due to a migration to a new technological platform, which began in 2011, as Tnooz reported at the time. The company is still migrating its hotel package content to the new platform, but all flights and stand-alone hotels are all migrated, said Washington.
To outpace its competition in appealing to the under-30s, Expedia has ramped up considerably its iteration of new functionality. In 2012 it did eleven times as many A/B tests as it did in 2011, and it will do about 400 this year, with many overlapping, said Washington.
Washington was proud that Expedia's apps and mobile version of its website were sufficiently up to date this summer.
When the UK's weather was unusually pleasant, 40% of consumers stopped searching the overall travel market (not just Expedia) via desktop while there was barely a drop off in usage of its mobile versions, according to Google’s weekly travel metrics data.**Corrected 16 October. Original version stated that this statistic was Expedia-specific. Sorry.
But the platform still isn't as nimble as it could be. Expedia's survey shows that millennials consider having wifi access at a hotel to be more important than a having a chance to earn loyalty point or receive an upgrade, yet Expedia's hotel search results don't default to promote hotels that reflect that preferences when someone from that demographic is doing a search.
Expedia's lead in the mobile space gives it an edge. The average customer is not going to have a dozen separate travel apps on their mobile devices. So if Expedia wins the mobile war to become the most popular travel app, it could become the distribution point that airlines, hotels, and other suppliers must work with to reach consumers.
The funnel never goes away. Even to reach millennials.
NB: Images courtesy of PRNewsFoto.