Search Behavior Spurs Orbitz

December 26, 2011

This is how search is changed on a mobile device. Forget in-depth and iterative queries. I want a hotel room tonight! That’s our take-away from Media Post News’s piece, “Orbitz: 65% of Mobile Hotels Bookings Are Same-Day.” By contrast, only 14% of bookings from the desktop site are for the same day. Tablet users are in between, at just over 30%.

Armed with the new mobile statistic, Orbitz seeks to build its revamped mobile site around customers’ ever more immediate needs. Writer Steve Smith relates:

‘This new medium of mobile allows them to comparison shop and find great deals at the very last minute,’ says [Orbitz VP, Chris] Brown. The new Orbitz.com for mobile Web browsers includes ‘Mobile Steals’ — discounts of up to 50% on hotels that are available only to mobile customers, including iPad users. ‘We’re uniquely positioned to pair that demand with suppliers with unfilled rooms and provide great rates,’ he says.

Yes, they are. With over 2 million unique users per month, Orbitz is eager to serve. Immediately. As mobile search behavior becomes the norm, what happens to research centric research? High school term papers may be two or three paragraphs long with research conducted entirely by poking and accepting what a system outputs.

Cynthia Murrell, December 26, 2011

Comments

Comments are closed.

Search the site
Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive

Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.