Asian travellers 'embracing online bookings in a big way'
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Asian tourists are driving a wave of growth in online bookings, Online Travel Agencies (OTA) said at a travel conference in Singapore yesterday.
The top executives of regional and global OTAs, which included Expedia, Booking.com, Agoda, and TripAdvisor, have said that the increasing number of Asian travellers would drive the growth of online business.
At this year’s conference entitled “Web in Travel”, the OTAs also believed that the use of the Internet for travel grew by 50 per cent in the region while online ticketing doubled over the past few years. As a result, operators are forced to develop more marketing and solutions to meet with the demand of the new generation.
Aman Bhutani, senior vice president engineering, and John Kim, chief product officer at Expedia Worldwide, said online operators should provide more data and information on their website or online channel in order to give consumers an experience before they make a reservation.
Moreover, there is a need for easy and simple Internet surfing to encourage faster decision-making for online transactions.
According to Gillian Tans, chief operating officer of Booking.com, a lot of Asian tourists are booking air tickets and hotel rooms online before travelling. This is a big change in the behaviour of Asian tourists in the past decade.
“Right now, our main market was B2C [business to consumer], and we are now focusing more on B2B [business to business], as this has become a huge segment,” said Tans, adding that though people can go online and make their own decision, its aim is to ensure loyalty so that people stay with Booking.com.
Earlier, many travel operators said that Asian Millennial Travellers (AMTs), which comprised approximately a quarter of Asia’s total population, had made a significant shift online over the past couple of years. Social media and mobile devices were unanimously cited as reasons behind the shift.
Marc Charron, president of TripAdvisor for business, said online booking in China was still slow due to limitation in language skills and inexperience in travelling. Therefore, China is expected to become a huge market for online business soon.
“It is early to see the Chinese go online. But there is huge room to grow,” he added.
Timothy Hughes, vice president for marketing at Agoda, said that despite crisis situations such as the political unrest in Thailand and the Sars epidemic in Asia some years ago, people still travelled and deserve a good package through the Internet and online.
