One in five hotel rooms booked online cancelled

Data released by Dohop reveals that 19% of room bookings that are made online are cancelled before the traveller arrives at the hotel. The cities with the highest number of cancellations were found to include Rome, Barcelona, Milan and Benidorm.

In terms of traveller by country, the Russians were found to have an extraordinarily high level of cancellations at 75%. That's far more than for the UK, with a cancellation rate of 11.8% or Norway at 12.6%.

While 19% would appear to be high, Dohop says that in comparison to the average for bookings across the board, it is actually lower.

Dohop's dive into their data also reveals that the average length of stay in a hotel is four days and that the time between booking and arrival is six weeks. This gives travellers plenty of time to research alternatives, which may contribute to cancellations, or for other reasons to cancel to crop up. However, Dohop also found that 12.7% of all bookings made are for one-night, last-minute hotel bookings.

Almost a third (31%) of bookings via Dohop were found to be made via a mobile device. This is indicative of demand for such a service. However, according to a recent study from Radware, a whopping 76% of online travel booking services are not optimized for mobile.

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Tags: hotel, mobile, travel, travel booking