Why booking trips on your phone is a bad idea: the ‘drip pricing’ of add-on fees that make flights expensive, and the switching between tabs
- A lot of online shopping is done over phones, especially by Generation Z consumers, but the convenience may be offset by higher prices
- Many websites use ‘drip pricing’ to lure customers with promises of lower prices, then hit them with add-ons that push up the cost
Since the first iPhone launched 15 years ago, consumer shopping habits have slowly but relentlessly shifted towards mobile devices.
According to a survey of 3,250 US consumers from Pymnts.com, a website dedicated to analysing the role of payments in new tech, most travel service purchases (51.4 per cent) were made on a mobile device in February 2022.
About 48 per cent of millennials aged 25 to 40 prefer using mobile phones for online shopping, compared with only 34 per cent of all shoppers globally, according to a 2021 survey of 13,000 shoppers from Klarna, an online payment company.
So it seems that shopping for travel on a personal computer will eventually go the way of the horse and buggy.
Indeed, some travel shopping services, such as the travel search engine Hopper, offer only in-app shopping for certain bookings, leaving desktop users high and dry.
However, while buying a flight on a phone is more convenient, it could be more costly.
