India Leads the Way in Mobile Travel Search in the APAC region

Most Asian countries are witnessing a rapid move towards planning and booking travel on the go resorting to using mobile devices as opposed to the conventional desktops for travel search, as reported by a leading travel search site. In the Asia Pacific region, South Korea leads the way in mobile travel search with 80% of flight searches followed by Japan which recorded 71% of flight searches coming from mobile devices to the travel search site. Interestingly, India is not far behind when it comes to mobile travel search, ranking third in the Asia Pacific region with 70% of all flight searches coming from mobile devices in the sub-continent.

It is interesting to note that this trend of ‘planning travel on the go' is not limited to Asia with travellers from Australia, Brazil, Canada and the US are now using mobile devices for over 70% of flight searches, compared with a global average of 53%.

Skyscanner, the world's fastest growing travel search site, has seen its mobile apps grow by over 400% in the past year as mobile visits overtake web for the first time. The site's flight search app has been downloaded over 20 million times. At the current rate it is being downloaded somewhere in the world every second and there have been over 250 million searches made since the travel search site first launched its apps. In fact, most mobile devices in India have reported an increase in travel searches in February as compared with January this year. Amongst the mobile devices used for travel search, Android and iPhone emerged as the most popular devices amongst Indian travellers followed by the iPad, Windows phone and BlackBerry respectively.

Bonamy Grimes, Chief Strategy Officer and Co-founder of Skyscanner says, "It's clear that online businesses need to be mobile to succeed over the coming years and thus we've focused our mobile strategy on making the most of the technology on each platform. It's far more consumer friendly this way and we're seeing our users respond accordingly. For instance, Android and Windows users can pin live tiles to the homepage to keep an eye on flight price changes, while BlackBerry users can share and chat about a search using BBM technology. We're continuing to build on our free text search and voice recognition technology to make the mobile travel booking process as intuitive as possible."

Kavitha Gnanamurthy, Skyscanner's Market Development Manager for India, said: "During the busiest travel booking week in January, Skyscanner's mobile app was the number 1 free travel iPhone app for in over 100 markets including the US.* It is good to see India alongside the tech-savvy Far East countries of South Korea and Japan which have reported the highest number of flight searches on mobile devices with Android being the most popular mobile device.  In fact, mobile travel search in India constitutes 72% of overall traffic."

(*Source - App Annie download rankings)