Mobile is a great tool for travel research, but not so much for booking

Mobile travel booking still significantly lags mobile travel research. eMarketer expects the gap to narrow slightly by 2016, but the number of actual bookers still will be only half that of travel researchers. (By comparison, the ratio of online travel bookers to online travel researchers in 2012 is closer to 4:5.)

MediaPost: What’s holding back more transactions? User concerns about the security of mobile purchases is one. Also, because travel purchases tend to have multiple interconnected parts, a pre-planned, multichannel travel purchase process will possibly include some research through a smartphone, but most likely will result ultimately in an online or offline booking.

But, where smartphones come in handy is for last-minute bookings. Both Orbitz and Travelocity have reported that more than 60% of hotel bookings made on mobile phones were for the same day.