Sojern: 25% of All Hotel Searches Are Conducted on Mobile 30 or More Days in Advance of a Trip

3/6/2017
Sojern, a travel performance marketing engine, released From Search Engine to Booking Engine: Sojern’s 2017 Hotel Report. The project combines Google’s deep insight into hospitality and hotel search trends with Sojern’s unique data set of 350 million global traveler profiles, including billions of booking and search signals from data partnerships across the travel industry. The new research report offers a state-of-the-art view of the hotel consumer’s extremely complex path-to-purchase.
 
Sojern’s 2017 Hotel Report is a tool for hotel marketers to understand the evolving journey a guest is likely to take while discovering, researching, and ultimately booking a stay. The report’s insights offer guidance to help hoteliers better time their marketing programs and maximize bookings by reaching consumers when they are most receptive to a message.
 
A few of the trends identified in the report:
 
Mobile is Now the Dominant Channel for Hotel Searches
 
Looking at device preferences for search, mobile is now the primary mode with over 53% share of U.S. search volume. Interestingly, some audience segments have moved faster to adopt mobile search than others, notably the economy and midscale segments. 73% of all searches for the economy hotel segment are now taking place on a mobile device. Compare that with 62% for midscale hotels, 53% for upscale and 45% for luxury hotels.
 
Mobile Search Is Growing Fastest for Luxury Hotels
 
For hotel brands in all segments, mobile queries are growing rapidly, but luxury brands are seeing more growth of shares of mobile queries compared to more economical market segments. During July – December 2016 compared to the same time period the year before, luxury hotels saw an increase of 23% in share of mobile searches, compared with 19% for upscale hotels and 14% for economy hotel brands. The lower growth rate of mobile searches for the latter is partially due to the fact that most searches for hotels in this segment are already happening on mobile.
 
Mobile Searches and Bookings Spike on Weekends
 
Desktop and mobile behaviors follow similar patterns throughout the work week, with weekends seeing a significant uptick in mobile searches (27-28%), and mobile bookings peaking at 14% on Sundays.
 
When looking at mobile behaviors in the context of trip lead time, a notable difference arises between search and bookings. Sojern’s data shows that a quarter of all hotel searches are conducted on mobile 30 days or more in advance of the trip, but only 11% of mobile bookings are done within that window, indicating a “leaky pipeline” — those mobile searches are not converting into mobile bookings. Hoteliers should be moving quickly to improve their mobile booking experience in order to capture this accelerating search volume.
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