Less than 20 years ago, when Apple launched its first iPhone and its App Store,
were expected to upend the entire tourism experience in the near future. We are now living in that future. There is not a single aspect of travel that has not been profoundly impacted by mobiles, from booking flights and accommodation services via smartphones to reviewing attractions and sharing trip memories on social media. Over the last five years,
has tripled in size, exceeding 1.2 billion U.S. dollars in 2023. As estimated by Statista Market Insights, the United States alone represented over 40 percent of the total value, ranking ahead of China, the
.
What are the most popular travel apps?
Among the metrics that can be used to measure the popularity of a mobile app, such as the
retention rate, the number of downloads is a first useful indicator to understand the effective interest in that product. Looking at the online travel agency (OTA) market, Booking.com, Airbnb, and Agoda ranked as the
most downloaded OTA apps worldwide in 2023. That said, when focusing on the U.S., a different scenario emerged, as Airbnb, Expedia, and Vrbo topped the list of the
most downloaded online travel agency apps in the United States that year, ahead of Hopper and Booking.com.
Mobile vs. desktop travel bookings
According to estimates by Statista on the
revenue of leading OTAs worldwide broken down by device, the mobile segment was slightly more profitable than the desktop one for Booking Holdings, generating nearly 11 billion U.S. dollars in 2023. By contrast, desktop users accounted for the highest revenue of other leading players in the
online travel market, such as Expedia Group and Airbnb. In this respect, while mobile devices represented around two-thirds of
global travel and hospitality websites’ traffic in 2023, figures on the average conversion rate tell a different story. That year, less than three percent of those sites' visitors finalized a booking via mobile, whereas the
travel websites’ conversion rate via desktop was almost three times higher. At this point, the next challenge of the mobile travel market seems clear: smartphones have the travelers’ attention when it comes to planning, but there is still much room for growth in the travel booking phase.
This text provides general information. Statista assumes no
liability for the information given being complete or correct.
Due to varying update cycles, statistics can display more up-to-date
data than referenced in the text.
