Who’s Travelling? Female Travellers Spend More

In Net Affinity’s Digital Trends for the Hotel Industry, we analyzed the data from nearly 6,000,000 website sessions. We looked at transactions, booking patterns, conversion rates and more in the 6-part report. One of the key facts we uncovered in the demographics section was that, when it comes to browsing and booking, women top the charts.

70% of website sessions in the period studied (August – October 2016) came from female users.

Interestingly, however, the data shows that men of all ages convert at a higher rate than women. This means that, while men visit hotel websites less often than women, when they do visit they’re more likely to make a booking.

What about age? The younger you are, the likelier you are to be online. The 25-34 group make up the highest volume of web sessions for women, and the highest volume of transactions for men.

This might be due to older guests preferring to research and book through more traditional methods. Alternately, younger people may be doing more intense price and property research.

These patterns are based on an aggregate of hundreds of hotels and millions of web sessions, so individual hotels will see a great deal of variation in their own figures. What differences does your hotel see? Why do you think those differences exist? Is it down to location, target market, price point or something else?

There are three action points we’ve drawn from the demographics report:

1. Track your demographics carefully and look at individual markets
2. Act on your knowledge – create special offers specifically for your most frequent guests
3. Make certain your marketing spend accounts for the natural peaks and lows of different markets

For the full details of the demographic report, along with booking patterns (including cancellations vs bookings), the online traffic landscape and device trends, we highly recommend you download the full report – there’s a lot to discover!