Hotels will be able to track their mobile booking performance against a national average thanks to the launch of a new ‘mobile barometer’
In Ireland, according to Data Portal, more than 5.3m mobile connections were active in the country in 2023, which exceeds 100 percent of the population.
And in the UK, Forecasts from Statista state that by 2025 retail sales from m-commerce in will surpass £100bn, which coincides with growth in the number of mobile users – anticipated to be nearly 100 percent of those aged 16-54 as of 2023.
This continued growth in mobile usage for e-commerce and hotel booking has driven leading hotel technology provider and booking specialist Net Affinity to launch its new Hotel Mobile Barometer.
William Cotter, Founder and Managing Director at Net Affinity, said: “We’re proud to be market leaders in driving mobile ecommerce, having been delivering pioneering mobile performance for our clients for over a decade.
“This experience has given us access to a wealth of data, which we’ve used to create a mobile barometer. This barometer looks at the data of our UK and Ireland based customers for 2024 so far, and in turn allows us to provide hoteliers with benchmark statistics on mobile performance.”
Data collated since Net Affinity launched in 2014, shows a steep growth for mobile usage to 2019, when it became the dominant device for the target audience. It has remained the dominant device, but growth has slowed from 2020, with slight fluctuations since, depending on seasonality, economic trends and of course the pandemic.
William continued: “Although examining averages across datasets can provide context, hoteliers should be aware of how their hotel stacks up against competitors in the market. Because of this, it’s essential to dig deeper into the data and examine more specific information.”
Data from January to June 2024 highlights that mobile bookings remains dominant in Ireland with 59 percent. However, average booking value is 13 percent higher on desktop, mostly driven by longer length bookings from overseas markets.
This is changing though, with the path to purchase and quality of user experience now dictating the success of high value bookings on mobile devices.
Net Affinity notes other significant factors impacting the success of a hotel via mobile, including star rating, property type and persona, and marketing activity.
“Having well-optimised mobile campaigns can result in significant growth, as marketing platforms are constantly investing in the mobile experience,” said William. “Additionally, META and other social platforms receive more than 90 percent of their traffic from mobile devices, so for hotels to deliver business from these platforms, it is likely to be on mobile.
“At Net Affinity we also support our clients with marketing and the comparative mobile results to those that do not use our services are impressive – with a nine percent increase in mobile bookings for those clients where we orchestrated marketing campaigns, underlining the impact of effective marketing.”
The data review also demonstrated the importance of the path to purchase on mobile, and the need for hotels to have the technology in place to allow customers to return after researching to complete their booking via mobile.
William concluded: “If a user’s mobile experience isn’t seamless, they’ll look for alternatives, which might lead them to competitor websites or OTAs, or switch devices, which can cause frustrations and add time to the purchase process if not leading to them abandoning the booking entirely.
“With this new service and offer to customers and through our harnessing of data we are empowering hotels with the insight to understand what the rest of the independent hotel market is seeing.”
For more information on Net Affinity, please visit: www.netaffinity.com and for examples of how its technology has impacted hotels, visit: https://www.netaffinity.com/casestudies.html.
https://www.netaffinity.com/Hotel-Mobile-Barometer-2024.html
