Expedia Winning at Mobile in Southeast Asia: New Study


Skift Take

A bigger chunk of online travel bookings will be made through mobile in Southeast Asia and players need to improve the user experience fast. Learn from Expedia, which has been anointed the guru of mobile in the region by a Google/Accenture study.

Expedia Singapore offers the best mobile experience in Southeast Asia, according to a study of 45 most trafficked travel brands in the region by Google and Accenture Interactive. First, a caveat: Google and Accenture have been in partnership since 2016 to sell solutions to clients that can improve their mobile user experience, hence the study is also in its best interests. These tools include Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages, which aims to enable faster loading times, or Progressive Web Apps, which basically is having the website look and behave as if it is a mobile app. This is the first time the partners have surveyed the “masters of mobile” in Southeast Asia, the research coming at a time when mobile travel sales in the region are starting to become substantial. Across Asia-Pacific, mobile travel sales crossed the 50 percent threshold in 2017, driven largely by consumers in China, South Korea, Australia and Japan, according to a New Digital Traveler research by Criteo. Southeast Asian markets are following in the footsteps. By 2020, 35 percent of online travel sales in Singapore, for example, will be made on mobile, 15 percent in Indonesia and 10 percent in Vietnam. This is thanks to rising penetration of smartphones in the region and a high proportion of