BOOKING.COM REVEALS TRAVELERS’ TOP WANTED AMENITIES BY NATIONALITY

To be comfortable away from home, travelers from all over the world appreciate different luxury touches. When you get an appetite for a late night snack, do you raid the accommodation’s mini bar or do you connect to the Wi-Fi to order a pizza to the place you’re staying? Do you expect your airport transfer to be waiting for you at the gate, or is an onsite parking spot for your rental car all you require?

These are important questions, as facilities are the top thing travelers consider when making a booking as indicated by recent research* from Booking.com, the global leader in connecting travelers with the widest choice of incredible places to stay. More than a third of global travellers (35%) consider facilities one of the most important pieces of information when making a booking, slightly ahead of other considerations like “transportation to the accommodation” and “reviews from other travelers” .

So what are the amenities travelers want access to? While the Golden Age of the minibar may have passed, research shows that today’s travelers want practicalities like free Wi-Fi, air conditioning, and a good breakfast.

Who ordered room service?

However, these results also vary by nationality. Room service is the most important amenity to Indian travelers, with a whopping 81% of Indian travelers marking it as important. To the majority of European travelers room service is not hugely important, while North and South America are clearly divided on the issue.

Similarly, while most travelers agree that Wi-Fi and air conditioning are the top priorities, exact preferences vary. A much larger share of Japanese travelers (60%) attaches importance to air conditioning than to Wi-Fi (36%). Conversely, only 30% of Danish travelers find it important to have air conditioning, while nearly half require Wi-Fi (49%).

Decision time

With so many options to choose from, many travelers call on outside expertise to ensure they make the right decision. By far the most popular source of information for travelers before making a booking is “reviews from other travelers” as a third of travelers (33%) lists this as one of the three most important pieces of information they want to know before making a booking.

Here too, there is quite a bit of divergence in national preferences: Russians, Koreans and Brazilians spend the most time sourcing opinions, roughly six in ten travelers from these countries prefers to consult at least one source of reviews before making a booking. On the other end of the spectrum we find the Japanese, Mexicans and Swedish, where roughly six in ten of travelers from these countries does not attach primary importance to any kind of reviews, basing themselves solely on what they know about facilities and other relevant information.

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* Research commissioned by Booking.com and independently conducted among a sample of adults who have taken a trip in the last 12 months/plan to take a trip in the next 12 months. In total 56,727 respondents were surveyed (2000+ from Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Germany, Spain, France, Hong Kong, Indonesia, India, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Malaysia, Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, United Kingdom, and the US, and 1000+ each from Denmark, Croatia, Sweden, and New Zealand). Respondents completed an online survey in October 2017.

** Percentage of global respondents who rated this amenity “important” or “very important”.

*** Percentage is based on the amount of global respondents who ranked this as one of the top 3 pieces of information they would like to know before making a booking.

Visualizations created using Tableau Desktop.