It’s not that Millennials don’t have it together.

We’re just organized on tiny, slippery smartphones completely covered in drop-wounds. So why are 18- to 34-year-olds known for last-minute booking? The answer is also a question: Which type of Millennial traveler are you – business or leisure?

Millennial business travelers don’t think twice about dropping some serious cash on last-minute bookings for hotels and flights—not to mention room service, seat upgrades, and in-flight entertainment. It’s on the company card. Why book ahead? Queue up the steaks.

Some 52 percent of millennial business travelers book on mobile devices, according to Expedia and more than 60 percent of mobile hotel bookings happen within 24 hours of a stay, according to Orbitz and Travelocity.

But just like the nouveau hipster mullets some of us fancy wearing, Millennials are good at separating the business from the party. When it comes to booking leisure travel on our own dimes, we Millennials love the thrill of chasing down the best deals through copious, nerdy research—and we take our sweet time doing it.

The Internet is an enchanted wonderland of tools for analyzing the crap out of our next trip.
We typically check out at least 10 sites before booking, reading reviews on sites like TripAdvisor and Yelp, gauging price predictions on Bing Travel and Airfarewatchdog, then cross-referencing hotels between myriad online travel aggregators like Travelocity and Expedia and their own sites.

We want to book flights and hotel rooms at exactly the optimal time for exactly the optimal price. Why? Because it’s fun.

My stream of consciousness during a trip-planning session might go something like this:
What are my Travelocity alerts doing? I’m kind of a big deal on TripAdvisor, should probs check in over there…. *Bing Travel refresh* … bing says to wait … let’s check airbnb, just for fun … JK, hippies are gross. Expedia, Kayak, whatchu got? * Bing Travel refresh* … nope, still too high. Hmm, $50 off 3 nights on hotels.com. I want cake.

This ritual will probably happen at least three times before I pounce on the best deal.
Whether booking last minute on the company card, or researching for weeks to save our own money, most of the booking and planning is done on mobile devices.

So, it’s probably safe to say if you could only do one thing this year to get on the radar of last-minute Millennials, it should be optimizing for mobile.

Don’t worry, hotels, it’s easier than you think! You don’t need a second website, you just need one website built with responsive design. Responsive design automatically scales and stacks your web content according to the screen size it’s being viewed on.

When looking for a vendor to update your site, be sure to ask first about responsive design. Secondly, you might want to ask about how the content gets updated, how fast, and who’s doing it.

Imagine being able to publish new promotions whenever you wish to snag last-minute bookers. Optimal, right? We ♥ optimal.

One way that 6,000 properties worldwide have published responsive web designs and gained the power to control their own content is with buuteeq’s cloud-based digital marketing system.

Learn more.

This content is created in partnership with our sponsor, buuteeq.

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