Some 19% of hotels that are booked online are cancelled before the guest arrives at the hotel, according to data provided by Dohop.
The travel search business, which runs its hotel channel as an affiliate of Booking.com, has released a heap of data to illustrate some of the trends of 2015 in the hotel booking world.
The one in five cancellation metric is "rather high", Dohop argues, but says the figure is actually lower than the average for bookings running through the wider Priceline Group-owned mothership.
Broken down by source country, Russians are apparently either incredibly indecisive with their choice or find something else to do before taking a trip, with 75% (!!) of hotel bookings cancelled. This is in stark contrast to Brits and Norwegians which have a cancellation rate of 11.8% and 12.6% respectively.
The areas containing the most cancelled hotel bookings included Milan, Rome, Benidorm, Barcelona and Tenerife.
Some of the other top-line datapoints included:
- The average length of a stay is four days
- Average lead-in time between a booking and arrival is six weeks
- Almost a third (31%) of bookings are made on a mobile device
Interestingly, Dohop found that there is a noticeable trend for one-night, last-minute hotel bookings on the system (12.7% of all bookings made).
It notes that such a model may continue to increase in size if Airbnb-type acccommodation sucks up more more longer stay trips, with hotels taking the short-term, last-minute segments.