Travelers Spend Over 5 Hours Researching Trips, Says Expedia

Travelers spend over five hours researching trips online during the 45 days prior to their final booking, according to recent research released by Expedia Group.

Titled “The Path to Purchase“, the research is a collaboration between Expedia and Luth, a renowned path-to-purchase market research firm.

To compile the final report, Luth tracked and evaluated traveler behavior from seven countries in the 45 days before a trip booking. Data collected on those who booked travel in the last 12 months surpassed 70,000.

Furthermore, the company issued a survey asking 5,710 respondents about the motivations and influences driving a recent trip.

On average across the seven countries surveyed, travelers view 141 pages of travel content in the 45 days prior to booking a trip —this number skyrocketed to as high as 277 pages for  US travelers.

In addition, the research showed that the page views span content across various website categories with online travel agencies (OTAs) accounting for nearly half of these page views (67 pages), followed by airline websites (33 pages), hotel websites (16 pages), and meta travel websites (16 pages).

Source: Expedia.

While trying to decipher the traveler’s trip purchase journey, Expedia and Luth found that the average path to purchase or trip consideration window — when a traveler started thinking about a trip to booking — is 71 days, with 33 days in the inspiration phase and 38 days in the research and planning phase. The post-purchase window — the time between booking and taking the trip — is 73 days on average.

Family is largest source of inspiration

The survey also revealed that the largest source of inspiration in the initial phase is family, with 37 percent of travelers inspired to plan a trip after a conversation with a family member.
Even with outside influences, the trip destination is often undecided during the inspiration stage.

Before selecting where to go on their trip, 59 percent of travelers did not have a specific destination in mind or considered multiple destinations. Of the 13 percent of travelers who considered more than one destination, they considered three different destinations, on average.

Social media plays its part in planning process

Social media are a powerful source of inspiration and recommendations for travelers, with Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube being the top three social media platforms used throughout the
planning process.

According to Expedia “travelers want real examples of other people’s experiences as well as their reviews or feedback on a specific hotel, activity, or destination, and social media is an effective platform for sharing and consuming those.”

Source: Expedia.

Finally, when asked about their most recent trip, more than half (51 percent) of travelers booked on an OTA , 37 percent booked on an airline website or app, and 23 percent booked
on a hotel website or app. Expedia’s survey notes that some travelers booked multiple trip elements across multiple travel websites.