Transaction Trends

Next-generation payment methods like mobile wallets, cryptocurrency and voice ordering have consumer appeal for travel booking, a recent survey by digital flight information provider OAG has found. When asked about “modern payment method” usage, half of respondents said they would be willing to use PayPal, 42 percent said they would be willing to use Apple Pay, and six percent said they would be willing to use Bitcoin to pay for travel bookings.

The “modern” payment methods also pulled notably strong support from younger consumers, the study found. Among millennial respondents, 56 percent said they would use Apple Pay, 14 points higher than the general cohort; Bitcoin support more than doubled to 14 percent. Mobile wallets can offer a faster and more convenient payment process for travelers, OAG said in the report.

“Convenience, speed and customer experience rule the travel ecosystem – and the booking and payment process is no exception,” Mike Benjamin, chief technology officer of OAG, said in the press release about the results. “While we don’t expect a major shift in the travel booking market overnight, the threat of new startups and major tech players radically simplifying or transforming the experience should not be discounted.”

Travelers also registered notable support for travel booking through online ecommerce platforms, with 44 percent indicating they would consider booking travel through Amazon. Overall, about a third of respondents picked consumer platforms as a comfortable new platform for travel booking, followed by automated chat agents on websites (28 percent) and mobile AI assistants like Siri and Google Assistant (25 percent). Another 18 percent noted that AI-enabled smart speakers like Amazon Echo and Google Home as a new booking method with which they would be comfortable.

As for authentication, just under 60 percent of travelers said they would be willing to use biometrics like fingerprint of facial recognition to pay for goods and services.

The survey sample included 2,164 American travelers surveyed between December 2017 and January 2018. Two-thirds of respondents were leisure travelers with the rest identified as business travelers, the report said.

Click here to view the full report.