Luxury travel must be mobile ready

Small Luxury Hotels of the World has revealed how significant mobile usage has become for the luxury travel company, with markets like China seeing growth in mobile usage of more than 400%.A year-on-year analysis for SLH’s online activity for January, traditionally one of the most popular booking months, not only reinforces the growing trend for mobile browsing and booking, but also underpins the growing demand for luxury travel in the emerging markets, which saw the greatest percentage increase of traffic to slh.com.Mobile traffic to its site in China surged 406% in the year to January 2013, with visits by iPhone users up 105%.Despite the growing figures, the percentage of visitors making bookings across all mobile platforms remains low, although the conversion rate is growing.Over 14% of all bookings in the last two quarters of 2012 were made by iPad, iPhone and Android, up from 7% across the same period in 2011.China and Russia saw a particularly large increase in year-on-year bookings by iPad users, with the iPad accounting for 24% and 15% of total bookings respectively.Bookings from iPad users in China in 2012 were zero.