Saudi Arabia mobile bookings for air travel up 116% in 2017

DUBAI: Mobile bookings for air travel rose a hefty 116 percent in Saudi Arabia in 2017, although desktop remained the dominant platform in the wider region for purchasing flight tickets, travel company Cleartrip said in its 2017 Travel Insights Report.
Among the major cities in the region, Riyadh had the highest rate of mobile bookings at 32 percent of all transactions there, with Jeddah close by at 31 percent, the report said. Mobile bookings in the Kingdom also comprised almost a third of all ticket purchases last year, Cleartrip added.
The 2017 Travel Insights Report also noted that the majority of bookings in the region — and Saudi Arabia in particular — were usually made a week prior to travel, although the report noted that mobile platforms were popular for last-minute travel bookings.
“Interestingly, the findings showed that there is a clear correlation between the number of travelers per ticket and the platform used for booking,” Cleartrip said. The report consolidated proprietary information from Cleartrip as well as data from the company’s more than 400 partner airlines.
“We closely monitor the new and dominant trends in the market to inform our business and product decisions and the 2017 Travel Insights Report is a natural outcome of our intense focus on understanding and solving customers’ needs,” said Stuart Crighton, the founder and chief executive of Cleartrip.
Dubai was the top destination for travelers in the region last year, followed by Sharjah, Manila and Abu Dhabi. The Armenian capital Yerevan meanwhile was the most trending destination for 2017, with bookings posting a whopping 498 percent rise over the previous year, followed by Georgia’s Tbilisi and Nepal’s Katmandu with both destinations recording twofold increases in online bookings.
Yerevan and Tbilisi have been heavily promoted as affordable travel and tourism alternatives and are extremely popular destinations, particularly for individuals in the UAE who need to go on a visa run to renew their stay in the Emirate.