WHY BOOKING TRAVEL ON YOUR PHONE IS A BAD IDEA

Since the first iPhone launched 15 years ago, consumer shopping habits have slowly but relentlessly shifted toward mobile devices.

According to a survey of 3,250 U.S. consumers from Pymnts.com, a website dedicated to analyzing the role of payments in new tech, the majority of travel service purchases (51.4%) were made on a mobile device in February 2022.

The trend is even starker among younger shoppers. About 48% of millennials ages 2540 prefer using mobile phones for online shopping, compared with only 34% of all shoppers globally, according to a 2021 survey of 13,000 shoppers from Klarna, an online payment company.

So, it seems that shopping for travel on an old-fashioned computer will eventually go the way of the horse and buggy. Indeed, some travel shopping services, such as the travel search engine Hopper, offer only in-app shopping for certain bookings, leaving desktop users high and dry.

However, while buying a flight on a phone is more convenient, it could be more costly.

WATCH OUT FOR DRIP PRICING

The rise in mobile shopping in the past decade has coincided with a sea change in how travel brands earn revenue. Add-on fees, including baggage and seat selection fees on flights and cleaning and resort fees with lodging, have become more common and pricey. U.S. airlines collected $5.3 billion in baggage fees alone in 2021, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics.