2024 Hilton Trends Report Reveals 80% of Travelers Feel It’s Important to be Able to Book Their Trip Entirely Online

According to a recent global survey conducted by Hilton and Ipsos, travelers say they will reduce other areas of personal spending to prioritize leisure travel in 2024. As they look to book their stays, travelers are looking for innovative and seamless digital solutions to simplify their overall travel experience and personalize their stay. For example, Hilton’s third-annual trends report: “What Millennials, Gen Z, Gen X and Baby Boomers Tell Us About Travel in the Year Ahead” revealed that 80% of travelers feel it’s important to be able to book their trip entirely online. 

"At Hilton, our goal is to simplify the complex and digitize the simple. We have seen an acceleration for highly personalized, digital, frictionless travel, and in turn, we’re continuously looking at ways to enhance the booking experience so that travelers can co-curate their experiences, beginning with their reservations,” said Chris Silcock, CCO, Hilton.

How Hilton embraces this trend:

• Hilton.com offers search filters that help personalize and simplify the search experience.
• In 2023, the top filters on Hilton.com that led to confirmed stays were: airport shuttles, EV charging stations, digital key technology, free parking, and pet-friendly hotels.
• EV charging had the fastest volume in growth over the past year. It jumped from the fourth to the second highest converting filter.

Travel App Tech

Following a global survey of more than 10,000 travelers from nine countries, video diaries with 60 U.S. travelers and in-depth interviews with dozens of Hilton travel experts, the report also found that 76% of global travelers appreciate travel apps that reduce the friction and stress of travel. Millennials (84%) and Gen Z (81%) were most appreciative.

How Hilton embraces this trend:

• Hilton Honors Digital Key and Digital Key Share are some of the most popular functions of the Hilton Honors app with nearly 12.3 million digital keys downloaded and more than 800,000 digital keys shared with travel companions between January and August 2023.
• Hilton debuted a new digital key innovation: Background Elevator Unlock, which allows guests to automatically connect to and unlock elevators as long as their Hilton Honors app is open in the background of their iOS device.
• Hilton’s Connected Room Experience welcomes guests by name on the guestroom TV and allows them to control in-room tech using the Hilton Honors app on their phones. This includes personalizing their preferences for popular streaming apps. At U.S. Connected Room Experience hotels, 80% of guests are watching video content, with those who stream enjoying about 5 hours of streaming per stay.
• Travelers want to engage with hotel teams via mobile messaging systems. Hilton’s technology allows hotel teams to check in on the guest’s experience throughout the stay, enabling a two-way, immediate exchange to answer questions, address concerns, arrange experiences and more. Mobile messaging within the Hilton Honors app and via SMS is currently deployed at more than 2,300 properties worldwide, with plans to expand to the entire portfolio in 2024. In June 2023, 63% of guests reported using mobile messaging during their stay at The Gabriel Miami South Beach, Curio Collection by Hilton; 100% of those guests’ on-property issues were resolved through engaging with the hotel team via messaging. 
• Travelers also want the ability to utilize the mobile technologies they’ve become accustomed to using every day, such as touchless payments with their mobile devices and smart watches. Today, more than half of Hilton’s portfolio of hotels offers touchless payments, with adoption expected to accelerate through 2024.

But for mobile app and in-room technology to be useful, guests need to be able to use their personal devices to connect with and use this technology in a seamless way. In fact, the survey found that 80% of global travelers say this type of seamless connection is important.

How Hilton embraces this trend:

• Hilton introduced a new cloud-based Property Engagement Platform which increases connectivity across various on-property technologies, speeding up computer-based transactions and allowing Hilton team members to focus on delivering more personalized service, including welcoming each guest personally and providing recommendations for dining and activities. 

"We’re always looking for ways to deploy solutions that meet the evolving needs of team members and guests. With Property Engagement Platform now in the cloud, we are able to quickly turn on technical improvements across our entire portfolio. We gather feedback from our hotel team members and use that to help inform what we develop next. As customer needs accelerate – so can our digital innovations,” said Michael Leidinger, CIO, Hilton.