Skift Take

People in the West traditionally have used mobile phones as a research tool and a desktop for transactions whereas in the East, since people mostly skipped the offline era, users began directly in the digital age through mobile. Companies looking to boost mobile commerce need to create unique touchpoints and tailor their product offerings to achieve a greater sales mix.

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The use of mobile devices to make online transactions is increasing remarkably and mobile continues to have a growing influence on how consumers plan and book travel. Yet mobile conversions still lag behind desktop. In this report we aim to estimate the size of mobile commerce globally as well as understand the regional variations in mobile commerce penetration in the travel industry. We focus on two travel sectors – hotels and flights – in North America, APAC, and Europe. 

For hotel bookings, we started by assessing the share of online mobile hotel bookings on both direct channels and online travel agencies (OTAs) at a country level and then calculated the hotel mobile revenue by applying the percentage share to the hotel industry revenue. 

As per our analysis, China and Australia are leading the pack with approximately 35 percent of total hotel bookings revenue coming from mobile devices. However, only 44 percent hotel bookings are made online in China while the share of online bookings in Australia is as high as 80 percent, meaning that mobile is a much more dominant online channel in China than in Australia. U.S., Canada, India, and Japan are not too far behind, with mobile bookings accounting f