Why booking travel on your phone is a bad idea

Online shopping, including travel shopping, has shifted from desktop to mostly mobile devices. Yet, research on shopping habits suggest that consumers make suboptimal choices when they cannot compare final prices. On a mobile device, it can be difficult to switch back and forth across brands or apps and complete a multistep flight or hotel booking process. — AP

Since the first iPhone launched 15 years ago, consumer shopping habits have slowly but relentlessly shifted toward mobile devices. According to a survey of 3,250 US consumers from Pymnts.com, a website dedicated to analysing the role of payments in new tech, the majority of travel service purchases (51.4%) were made on a mobile device in February 2022.

The trend is even starker among younger shoppers. About 48% of millennials ages 25-40 prefer using mobile phones for online shopping, compared with only 34% of all shoppers globally, according to a 2021 survey of 13,000 shoppers from Klarna, an online payment company.