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When planning and booking their vacation, compatriots are increasingly using their smartphones: That is the core message of a study by the Austrian Hotel Association (ÖHV). With the Viennese market research institute MindTake, more than 750 Austrians and Germans were asked – for the second time since 2019. “In the four years a lot has happened apart from the pandemic,” says ÖHV General Secretary Markus Gratzer. The most relevant factors for the booking are still the price, the availability of the room, photos, location and independent reviews. But user-friendliness for mobile use is also playing an increasingly important role, says Gratzer. “Booking via mobile devices is rapidly gaining in importance: there is no getting around it.”
According to the evaluation, this trend is also reflected in the use of end devices: In 2019, 64 percent of compatriots still booked via desktop devices, this year it is only 55 percent. In Germany, the value fell from 74 to 61 percent during this period.
When it comes to mobile bookings, the trend is in the opposite direction. Every third booking in Austria is made via mobile devices (2019: 25 percent), in Germany the share has increased from 17 to 29 percent within four years. The smartphone is also gaining in importance when it comes to research: 37 percent of domestic guests (2019: 28) and 25 percent of German holidaymakers (2019: 22) use their mobile devices to obtain information.
E-mail instead of contact form
The most important information and communication channels for holidaymakers are e-mail and telephone. Classic contact and inquiry forms, on the other hand, are losing favor according to the ÖHV study. Less than every fourth Austrian uses such forms. “They seem to have fallen out of time,” says Gratzer. Social media channels and newsletters have grown in popularity.
Source: Nachrichten
