Global online travel market shows positive dynamics.
The online travel market is expanding worldwide and projected to maintain positive dynamics despite a slowing growth rate. Global digital travel sales are expected to approach a 50% milestone in share of total travel sales in 2018, according to a forecast cited in the new publication from yStats.com. Much of the growth in the travel sector is expected to come from millennials and younger travelers who have high service expectations, make decisions based on travel recommendations and reviews and expect a personalized customer approach in their travel purchase journey.
Peer-to-peer sharing services experience stable growth.
Global peer-to-peer brands, like the lodging sharing services, such as Airbnb, and the ride-hailing services, such as Uber and Lyft, continue to grow in popularity with the Millennial generation. North and Latin America are expected to generate more than a half of the global sharing economy platform provider revenue and to become the main consumers of the P2P services through 2022. Airbnb.com also ranked third in the global ranking of the travel websites, after Booking.com and TripAdvisor.com in terms of total visits in the end of summer 2018, as revealed in the yStats.com report. North America is forecasted to continue to have the largest online travel sales share of total sales in the P2P sharing segment through 2018.
Mobile is an important driver for the global online travel sales growth.
The adoption of mobile booking technology and travel apps, also plays a significant role in the continued development of the global travel market. Countries of Latin America and Asia-Pacific were the leaders of mobile booking adoption, where smartphone users reported that they are comfortable researching, booking and planning their entire trips using only a mobile device. Nevertheless, desktop or laptop computers remain the main booking channel globally, as the yStats.com report shows.
