Mobile and tablet taking a chunk out of desktop hotel booking volume

Mobile and tablets are not only bringing down hotel bookings via desktop, but also page views, visits, room nights and revenue.

HeBS Digital, a digital marketing company for the hospitality industry, has studied data from hotel clients to understand the shift in trend towards mobile and tablet channels.

Here are the key points from the study.

Mobile and tablets lead, desktop loses

HeBS calls 2013 the year of three screens - desktop, mobile and tablet. In Q3 2013, there was a tremendous shift from desktop to mobile and tablet devices.

The table below shows the percentage split among the three screens for page views, visits, bookings, nights and revenue.

[table id=3823 /]

More than 35% of web visitors and nearly 32% of page views were generated from non-desktop devices (mobile and tablet).

More than 12% of bookings, room nights and revenue came from tablets and mobile devices (excluding voice reservations from mobile websites).

Tablets generated 210% more room nights and 603% more revenue than mobile devices.

iPad outperformed all other tablet devices with 88.2% of page views and nearly 97% of tablet revenue.

The table below shows the percentage increase/decrease among the three screens in Q3 2013 vs Q3 2012: [table id=3824 /]

Desktop website visitors declined by 17.11%, while mobile visitors increased by nearly 85%.

Desktop bookings declined by nearly 6% while mobile and tablet bookings increased by more than 86% and 57% respectively.

Mobile page views more than doubled, while desktop page views declined by more than 16%.

Revenue from mobile devices nearly doubled.

Revenue from desktop devices is on the decline by 4.34%.

Recommendations HeBS recommends hoteliers should treat the desktop, mobile and tablet as three separate channels in order to reap benefit from this trend towards mobile and tablet:

For tablets - utilize new content management technology for responsive design on server side (RESS), present tablet users with an enhanced, highly-visual version of the desktop website enabled for the touch-screen tablet environment.

Hotels should serve the right website content in the right device category (desktop, mobile, tablet) while ensuring the maximum user experience, relevancy of information and conversions.