Internet users in Australia who traveled for leisure were significantly less likely than their counterparts in China to use mobile devices as part of the travel research process, according to data from Criteo and PhoCusWright.
The December 2014 survey focused on internet users who had taken at least one trip in the past year. In Australia, around two-thirds of this group used a PC to do travel-related research?less than the 71% who did the same in China. But the real gap appeared when it came to mobile.
Respondents in China were more than 3.5 times more likely to report using a smartphone for travel research, and nearly twice as likely to use a tablet.
Criteo and PhoCusWright also conducted the survey in several countries outside Asia-Pacific, including France, Russia, Brazil, Germany, the US and the UK. China was ahead of them all in terms of mobile travel research. For smartphone-based research, Brazil came in second, with just 27% of respondents saying they did travel research on their phones. Brazil and Russia tied for second place when it came to tablets, at 20% each.
While leisure travelers in Australia may appear averse to mobile compared with those in China, they were doing fairly well compared with several other countries. They were more likely to use smartphones for travel research than those in France, Russia, Germany or the UK, and more likely to use tablets than those in France, Germany or the UK.
