A large percentage of Airline passengers are keen to pay for their airline tickets using mobile devices, according to the results of a study that have just been released.
The Perfect Passenger Payment report, which was undertaken by WorldPay, a payment processing company that provides payment services for mail order, Internet retailers and point of sale transactions, involved 4,500 global consumers who had purchased an airline ticket online in the past twelve months. The views of 50 airline merchants were also included in the study.
Key to the report’s findings was the fact that 50 percent of those consumers questioned would use a mobile device to purchase airline tickets now if the service were available, and 62 percent expect to have the option of doing so in the future. 6 percent had already used a mobile device to book a ticket. Figures that are not surprising considering that 56 percent of consumers already carry a smartphone or tablet device.
With regards to consumers being presented with hidden surcharges during the payment process that were not explained from the beginning, the UK fared worst with 41 percent of respondents here having experienced this problem, compared to only 8 percent in Japan, the country that fared best.
Continuing the theme of fairness, 80 percent of consumers considered it unfair to be charged for using their preferred payment method, including 87 percent that favour e-wallets, 86 percent that favour direct debits, and 84 percent that favour debit cards.
The time-conscious might like to know that the average customer takes 25 minutes to complete the payment process for an airline ticket, with a sizeable twelve-minute variation between the Japanese who were fastest at 20 minutes, and the Brazilians who were the slowest at 32 minutes.
Phil McGriskin, chief product officer at WorldPay commented, ‘Consumers are increasingly embracing technology such as smartphones and tablets to purchase goods and services online and this report shows that there is a demand for among customers to be able to purchase airline tickets using mobile technology. Currently only a small percentage of airlines offer mobile payments to their customers but a high percentage of customers, particularly frequent flyers, would like the option to be made available. As more airlines embrace mobile technology for other parts of the airport-to-flight experience, we expect this to be extended to the payment process.’
