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Europe’s share of global online travel market to decline despite mobile-driven growth, new report from yStats.com reveals

Europe Online Travel Market 2016” is the title of the new publication by yStats.com, a leading secondary market research organization based in Hamburg, Germany. The report finds that despite continuous increase in online travel sales, Europe’s share of the global market is likely to decrease by several percentage points in the next five years due to rapid expansion in emerging markets.

Europe is the third largest online travel market worldwide, according to the new report from yStats.com. In 2016, it is projected to account for more than a quarter of global online travel sales. However, as emerging markets across Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa are growing at a more rapid pace, Europe’s share is predicted to shrink by several percentage points within the next few years.

The UK is the leading country in Europe by online travel sales, despite Germany having a larger total travel market, the yStats.com report reveals. Travelers in the UK are increasingly using mobile devices to access online travel content, even though factors such as slow speed and a complicated payment process sometimes prevent smartphone users from completing a travel booking transaction on their devices. France also is seeing around a third of mobile-only visits to travel websites, as of mid-2016, and in Italy mobile bookings amounted to over 1 billion Euros in 2015.

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Accommodation is among the most popular online travel categories purchased in Europe, as shown in the yStats.com report. Although hotel and accommodation booking platforms, such as Booking.com, remain the leading destinations, the popularity of peer-to-peer accommodation portals, such as Airbnb, is rising. In Russia, more than 50% of Internet users are aware of such services, and in France, Airbnb was the third most visited travel website in mid-2016.

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