The online path to purchase for North American travellers

Our recent custom research with Luth Research explores traveller behaviour insights across seven geographic markets to uncover opportunities for your business. The research was conducted using digital tracking and survey data from respondents across the geographic markets: Australia, Canada, France, Japan, Mexico, the UK and the US. 

Recently, we highlighted findings from the global aggregate, and now, we’re doing a deeper dive into travellers from the Americas based on digital tracking data from a panel of more than 27,000 travellers and survey data from more than 2,400 respondents across Canada, Mexico, and the US. Read on for insights to help you engage and convert North American travellers throughout the various phases of their online travel purchase journey.

Page views occur on different online resources, but online travel agencies (OTAs) are a dominant resource, accounting for 40% of the total page views for Americas travellers. Throughout their path to purchase, 80% of Americas travellers, and as many as 83% of travellers from Mexico, visited an OTA at some point. This indicates that even if travellers ultimately book on another website, they are likely to have visited an OTA for inspiration, research or planning purposes.  

Travellers from the Americas also spend nearly 6.5 hours with travel content in the 45 days leading up to booking a trip, higher than the average of approximately five hours across all regions. In the US, travellers spend close to nine hours with travel content before booking.  

With so many opportunities to get in front of travellers, it’s important to find ways to stand out from the crowd to keep your content top of mind, including strategic partnerships and innovative travel solutions. We provide travellers around the world with everything needed throughout the path to purchase—from inspiration and recommendations to accommodation, transportation and activity options—for all types of travel, which brings you demand.

Travellers from the Americas rely on multiple travel inspiration sources. This creates an opportunity for you to connect with travellers across multiple touchpoints throughout the journey, including social media, which is the most popular resource used for inspiration.

Integrating social media into your content strategy, whether sponsored content or affiliate links, can help ensure that your brand stays top of mind early in decision making process and influence traveller choices.

Consider creating advertising content that highlights breathtaking locations and unique experiences with compelling deals and a clear call to action to engage with your brand. Our Media Solutions products can help your brand to target and connect with hundreds of millions of travellers around the world through a variety of advertising formats, from native and sponsored listings to display and custom campaigns.

This illustrates an opportunity for you to highlight features, flexibility and transparency, as well as competitive pricing, in your messaging and content throughout the travel shopping journey. One way to connect with travellers is through offering Members-Only deals, which allows properties like the Horton Grand Hotel to target high-value members of our rewards programme with specialised offers.

Promote your loyalty benefits in your content and across channels and ensure that you’re offering discounts, perks and amenities, and points for future travel to connect with loyalty travellers wherever they are booking. Our One Key^™ rewards programme allows travellers to leverage our OneKeyCash™ while still booking with their favourite brands. We offer a mix of flexible tools, custom offers and promotions, so you can target rewards members in a way that works best for your business.

For more insight into what drives decisions for Americas travellers throughout the online path to purchase, download the country snapshots and take a look at the full Path to Purchase study for more global insights. 

To stay up to date on the latest travel industry insights and for more traveller behaviour studies, visit our Resources page.