One quarter of all travel website shoppers will abandon online bookings if their local currency isn’t supported.
That is just one of many facts released in a recent study of visitor attitudes and preferences for travel booking websites. And it varies from one geographic market to another. For example, Japanese travel shoppers are right in the average with 25 percent saying they would abandon a booking if the shopping cart checkout did not show conversions to the Yen. But if you also market to France, the bias jumps to 46 percent. What is surprising is that less than 20 percent of the travel websites reviewed in these countries offered local currency conversions.
The globalisation of online travel has meant that consumers are happy to book on websites that are not based in their country. This is an opportunity to take your service to a larger market by tailoring your website to cater to the preferences a specific market.
To market effectively internationally requires intelligence, sensitivity and adaptability. There are variations for each market, at each of 7 stages of the booking process from homepage to shopping cart. If you’d like to learn more about optimising your website for specific or for general international markets, we have a series of reports that were commissioned by Worldpay, a major credit card payment processor. These reports shed light on a variety of specific markets as well as a general report on global averages. Mexico, Chile, Brazil, the U.S., Germany, Spain, France, the UK, China, India, Russia, South Korea and Australia are covered. Just send us a quick request for a report and we’ll be happy to send you a link.
Adventure Engine offers multi-language shopping carts as well as a full array over multi-currency conversions. See Backpack options.