32% Of UK Top Travel Brands Still Not Marketing Across Mobile Channels

The latest report from the Internet Advertising Bureau UK (IAB), has stated that 48% of the country’s 50 largest travel brands already have a mobile-friendly website. However, surprisingly 32% of them are yet to start using the mobile channel to engage with a constantly growing audience.

The share of those that still don’t have any kind of mobile presence is quite surprising, given the fact that the average Briton goes online through a connected device 34 times a day.

According to IAB UK’s Mobile Travel Audit that was conducted between September and October across the country’s top spending travel advertisers, just 6% of brands have a website that is optimised for tablets.

Around 52% of travel companies have a mobile app, but just 56% of them allow users to perform transactions and make direct purchases.

IAB also examined the uptake of single user journeys among brands, i.e. the number of signed-in customers that could see the items they have added to their basket on any kind of devices. The audit found that 71% of the 14 travel brands with a transactional app already use a single user approach, compared to just 33% of the 15 transactional apps used by the UK top 50 retail brands.

Only 42% of the top 50 travel brands have taken measures to optimise their search campaigns for mobile devices against 48% of retail advertisers, and just four of the top travel brands have adopted mobile search techniques that direct users to non-optimised mobile sites.

In view of the rapid adoption of mobile technology, it’s surprising to see so many travel brands that are yet to jump on the mobile bandwagon, IAB’s head of mobile Alex Kozloff commented. Mobile now makes up 14% of total digital spend and is no longer a medium that can be overlooked, he added.