Pitchup.com reports smartphone bookings up amid staycation boom

Camping and caravan holiday specialist Pitchup.com is claiming that smartphone bookings have more than doubled in the past week. The company registered a 111% rise in mobile bookings, which accounted for more than 35% of overall business. Mobile bookings so far in 2016 are up by 96% to 33,012 year-on-year, representing 28% of all reservations. … Continue reading Pitchup.com reports smartphone bookings up amid staycation boom

Camping and caravan holiday specialist Pitchup.com is claiming that smartphone bookings have more than doubled in the past week.

The company registered a 111% rise in mobile bookings, which accounted for more than 35% of overall business.

Mobile bookings so far in 2016 are up by 96% to 33,012 year-on-year, representing 28% of all reservations.

The compares to 23,275 smartphone bookings last year, representing 22% of all sales.

The recent surge in impulse holiday bookings via smartphone is driving a post-Brexit vote staycation boom this summer, according to the firm’s founder Dan Yates.

“Over the last three months, over 30% of our bookings were made on a smartphone, and we now receive 34% more bookings via smartphone than tablet,” he said.

“While bookings via smartphones and tablets overtook desktop bookings nearly two years ago, now smartphones are increasingly the norm rather than the exception, as they were when we launched our mobile site in 2013.

“The ubiquity of smartphones and improvements in technology, such as larger screens and mobile-friendly sites, mean that fewer people ‘device switch’ like in the old days when they would fire up the tablet or desktop computer when they got home, having spotted something on their phone in a lunch break.

“As such the main casualty appears to have been the tablet, rather than the desktop computer. Over the last three months, smartphones accounted for 43% of visits to our site.

“This in turn leads to more impulse purchases. As people are on their mobiles 24/7, their booking habits are more closely linked to external ‘emotional’ factors such as the news, weather or even their mood.

“It’s perhaps therefore no coincidence that this uptick in mobile bookings coincides with news predicting a heatwave for the latter part of August.”

A recent survey released by Hitwise revealed that 60% of all travel site searches originate from a mobile device.