Voice Searches for Travel Rise with Brands

Travel searches by voice are on the up according to some figures from Microsoft-owned Bing Ads.

The company reveals that Britons are increasingly seeking to book their hotel using the Cortana digital assistant on mobile devices with hotel searches seeing a 343% year-on-year increase in the UK.

Flight search using voice is not far behind with a 277% increase year-on-year, says Bing.

The large increases are not that surprising given that Cortana was launched for Windows 10 around the middle of 2015 and the research is pulled for the year from March 2016.

Added to that is the increased comfort level with voice with the advent of Alexa and Google’s voice search.

More interesting is 95% of the top 20 flights and accommodation searches, using Cortana, were for brands showing the different behaviour of search on mobile and using voice.

Bing points to Juniper Research from last year predicting that by 2021 more than four billion mobile assistants will be used globally.

Thom Arkestål, head of insights, EMEA, at Bing Ads says:

“We will likely see this number rise as consumers realise the potential of digital assistants to improve their everyday lives, something we are already seeing with smart home devices such as the Cortana-powered Amazon Echo, becoming integral to homes across the country.”