IT IS hardly a revelation that smartphones are changing the way that we travel. We increasingly use them to plan trips, as boarding passes for planes, to direct us around cities, even to help find a willing stranger with whom to join the mile high club. Just this week Google launched Trips, a smartphone app that organises plane tickets and hotel reservations, in part by scouring your Gmail account, and will guide you around a city offering ideas of things to do by looking into your history and what has been recommended by other users.
For all that, travellers are still amazingly reticent about actually booking travel on smartphones. New research by Wolfgang Digital, covered here by Skift, which looked at 87m web sessions, found that 57% of visits to travel websites are via a phones and tablets, with just 42% undertaken on desktops. And yet, in revenue terms, those using desktops make up 67% of bookings.