According to Make My Trip, a leading travel website, mobile phones have overtaken desktops as the preferred mode for booking hotel rooms among travellers in India. Presently, mobile contributes 53 percent of the overall domestic hotel bookings for the portal. Last year, hotel bookings via mobile contributed just 29 percent of the overall bookings.
Customers have traditionally preferred to book hotel rooms through travel agents. Nevertheless, in the past one year, most hotels and online travel agents have been aggressively pushing for bookings through the handsets by launching mobile apps for travellers.
According to the website, growth in hotel bookings via mobile was fuelled largely by last-minute transaction, with nearly 80 percent of booking made just a week before travel and 32 percent were for same-day hotel bookings. Customers have preferred bookings through mobile phones for small and budget-property owners in tier-3 towns such as Lansdowne in Uttarakhand, Khajjiar in Himachal Pradesh, Yelagiri in Tamilnadu and Alibaugh in Maharashtra.