Study: Travelers leaning on mobile for content

Forget AAA and local travel agents. When savvy vacation shoppers are looking for hot destinations, good deals and destination information they're not always going local. They're going online - and many are going farther than the desktop. They're going mobile.

The hottest properties for smartphone owners , according to comScore included the TripAdvisor Media Group, Expedia and Southwest Airlines. Women, interestingly enough, were consuming the most content for the month while men were more likely to be found on airline-specific sites like Southwest or Delta.

As for how these people were grabbing content, it was a fairly even split with 53% of the time spent with apps and 47% via browser. Nielsen disagrees a bit - their study found Android and iOS users were more likely to access mobile apps for travel information, to the tune of 95% of traffic coming from apps.

For travel brands, these reports seem to indicate a growing movement into the mobile space for travel customers. If people planning for a vacation or even a business trip are going to mobile for information and deals, it makes sense for the brands to be mobilly available with said content. Destination hotspots, where to stay deals or side trip type content could be added to the going rates to engage consumers past the typical hotel/flight information.

Local businesses could get in on the mobile content act, as well, offering deals to travelers planning stays within their cities.

Tags: comScore, mobile marketing, mobile trends, Nielsen, travel ad trends, travel ads