Travel Habits of Millennials: Older Millennials Outpace All Others in Mobile Booking

Over the last few months we have been doing a series of consumer surveys at regular intervals that probe various travel habits and nuances of millennials in America.

Fifth in this Travel Habits of Millennials 2015 series is a one of the biggest areas of activity for travel brands: Mobile booking. The question: Have you used your mobile phone — via either browser or app –to book an airline, hotel, or car in the past year?

This time, we decided to pose the question to the full American Internet audience, about 2,000 of them using Google Consumer Surveys, to understand how Millennials compare to other age cohorts.

And the results are illuminating, to say the least.

The topline answer: A large majority of Americans — 71 percent — haven’t booked any travel ever on mobile. But the flip side is that a full 21.4 percent of them have in the last year, a big number, anywhere from 50 million to 70 million people across America.

As for the millennial demographics against other age cohorts in America, here’s how it breaks down in the chart below: The older the demo, the less likely they are to have used their phones to book travel.

Among the millennials, a larger number of respondents in the older age group of 25-34 have done mobile booking than the younger 18-24, which is probably explained by the older millennial group being further along in workforce and using their phones for business travel bookings. In general, millennials are miles ahead of any other age group for using mobile booking.

Important: This online survey — not served to Skift users — was administered to about 2000+ members of the U.S. adult internet population, in the age range 18-64, in the first week of May 2015, through Google Consumer Surveys. The methodology is explained here.