The mobile revolution is probably one of the most important technological changes of the 21st century.
People use their mobile phones for almost everything: browsing, buying, selling, connecting - even dating.
But when it comes to booking their travel, mobile users face a number of challenges due to the poor user experience that a number of travel websites offer and the plethora information that needs to be entered.
On some travel websites,the payment process often takes too long and involves several steps that can frustrate the user.
But m-commerce continues to grow rapidly; in fact, it is estimated that by 2020,
worldwide digital travel sales will top $817 billion globally
.
Worldpay carried out research with 16,000 smartphone users across 10 countries in order to identify payment preferences.
One of the most interesting findings of this survey was that 84% of the respondents would now be willing to book flights on a mobile which has come a long way from when desktop was the preferred channel in previous years.
Travel companies that recognize this tremendous opportunity early on and tap into this can take full advantage of using mobile as key sales channel.
Companies can build a long-term relationship with their customers by providing them with a positive, frictionless and omni-channel journey. They can help to achieve this by optimising the entire user experience and payment journey.
We offer a number of solutions that will help travel companies transform the mobile user experience.
Here are three of our top recommendations:
Single-click APM
Our survey revealed that almost one out of four people don’t complete a booking because they had to enter too much information every time they shopped and this was time-consuming and frustrating for them.
Many travelers are eager to use new, alternative payment methods (APMs), if these offer them speed and convenience.
By using APMs to securely store payment data previously entered by the customer, companies may be able to shorten the payment journey.
APMs also allow users to pay with methods that they are familiar with and often reduce the number of steps it takes to make a payment.
Worldpay offers more than 300 APMs that companies can choose from (including Apple Pay, PayPal, Samsung Pay and many more) to allow their customers to pay in the way they want.
Tokenization
Travel companies should look to balance two important factors regarding the payment process when they choose in their m-commerce strategy: speed and security.
Tokenisation is one solution to both of these factors as it allows travelers to securely store their payment data.
According to Mastercard : "Tokenisation everywhere is critical to secure the digital world. Today, nearly 75% of all cards globally are ready to be tokenized."
To elaborate on that, a user can have an account with an airline or a travel agent and store their personal information and payment details there in advance.
Worldpay offers tokenisation by providing a secure token to the merchant every time a payment occurs; therefore, the user doesn’t have to put their details every time they make a purchase.
In addition, in the Worldpay survey mentioned before, 21% of respondents said that they didn’t complete a booking because they thought that the app wasn’t secure enough.
That means that travel companies should be looking to find ways to reassure their customers that their payment is in safe hands. Using m-commerce, companies can take advantage of mobile biometric authentication.
With biometric security, users can choose single-click payments using their fingerprint, rather than having to re-enter their details, perhaps multiple times; this can help to save them time and make the booking process simpler.
Worldpay’s range of products offering optimisation, e-wallets and a combination of payments, can help to significantly speed up the user journey and provide security reassurance.
Hosted payment pages
Worldpay’s research showed that 24% of UK mobile shoppers admitted that the top reason to abandon a purchase was that the checkout process took too long. One way for travel companies to combat this problem is to offer an easy, seamless and secure payment process to their customers.
The user needs to be directed to the next step very quickly and not wait for the page to load for too long. Speed and convenience is the key when it comes to payment pages.
Hosted payment pages integrate multiple payment methods and can help to make users feel as if the entire process is one seamless experience.
To achieve that, companies should build highly responsive apps and mobile web pages with optimized payment steps.
Worldpay offers templated payment pages which benefit from full optimisation and can be branded in line with the host business.
Worldpay’s pages have been designed with consumers in mind to help you as a business achieve the best user experience possible, and, because they are built to work across multiple devices, they can help to provide a more secure way to increase sales conversion.
Worldpay’s single integration allows access to payment methods across various devices, and because the page sits within Worldpay’s server, it can help with PCI compliance and optimized payments for m-commerce.
Conclusion
To stay ahead of the competition and increase their revenues from m-commerce, travel companies should aim to create a simple and secure user experience.
This can help them to build a loyal and long-term relationship with their customers and even foster impulse purchases.
Payments are a competitive differentiator among travel companies. Worldpay can help travel merchants benefit from the various innovative solutions we offer.
Our single-click APM, tokenisation and hosted payment pages are only a few options from the plethora of payment solutions that Worldpay offers and with which we help companies achieve their goals.
Moreover, our expertise in the travel sector and our industry awareness make Worldpay one the most valuable partners a travel merchant can have in the payment industry.