Unsurprisingly mobile usage is growing in most countries in Europe but in some places much faster than others

Icelandic flight search engine Dohop keeps a pretty low profile. It isn’t, says its website, claiming to ‘reinvent the wheel’ but what it has done is ‘create some pretty neat features’. That led to it winning the ‘The World’s Leading Flight Search Engine’ category at the World Travel Awards in 2014.

Based in Reykjavík, funded by shareholders and a government start-up fund Dohop launched in 2004 to aggregate and link low-cost flight options. According to Johann Thorsson, Dohop.com’s marketing manager, each search begins by finding all possible schedules for flights between A and B, including connecting flights, and then ask airlines and OTAs for prices for those flights.  

“By also asking for prices for A - C and connecting that with a C - B flight, we are able to show superior coverage and prices for connecting flights that others simply don’t,” he claims.

Dohop also has a flight affiliate programme and counts Gatwick and the Russian search engine Yandex, among its 13,000 customers.

Explaining how it works Thorsson says: “For Gatwick we provide data (schedules and prices) on airlines that don't have agreements in place. So we can pair flights, for example, from Norwegian and easyJet into a priced itinerary that Gatwick can present to their visitors as bookable in a single transaction, and for which they guarantee the connection.”

In other words, Gatwick uses Dohop’s white-label technology to provide their customers with a uniquely customised product.  

European focus

Using over 500,000 data points, Dohop recently compiled a report that compared the mobile usage of European visitors to both Dohop and affiliate sites in the first two weeks of 2016 against the same period the previous year.

No real surprises here, in the fact that overall mobile is growing - in 2016, 37% of users searched for flight via mobile versus 31% last year.

Interestingly, however, the majority of searches made via mobile device were in Cyprus. In Cyprus an impressive 67% (vs 43% in 2015) of all visits came from smartphones or tablets, followed by Germany at 48.3% (38% in 2015). Lagging the European pack is Hungary with the lowest ratio of mobile visitors; just 24% of travellers here use their mobile devices to search for flights.

Dohop has no data on the residency of people searching its sites, but as around 50% of visits are to locally branded sites using its affiliate programme there is clear local insight. “We know, for example, that these people in Cyprus are accessing a local website to search for flights, hotels or rental cars,” says Thorsson.

What the data certainly shows is the diversity of the European market. Who would have thought, for example, that mobile visitors in France would jump from 10.4% to over 40% in a year? Significant growth was also seen in in Portugal and Poland.

Meanwhile, while mobile visits in the UK rose by just under 5% it stayed ahead of European averages in both 2015 and 2016.

Spain and Greece were the only two nations to buck the trend; seeing a decline in usage during the two-week period. 

Tablet plateau

Take closer look at device use, it appears that tablet use (11.7%) has plateaued and the desktop is losing ground to the smartphone. In 2014, 11% of visits came from tablets (8% in 2013). By contrast, smartphone use rose from 5% in 2013, to 8.12% in 2014 to 20% in 2015.

So a significant jump by all accounts!

When comparing the US to Europe both markets are seeing around 37% of visits coming from mobile. However, the United States have taken a larger leap in the past year; from 22% to 37% in 2016.

Today Dohop is most popular in Europe because “low-cost travel is most advanced here our flight search technology is most useful here”.

However, as low-cost travel expands in Asia, Dohop will be looking east for growth – and indeed to anybody looking for a cheap flight.

Don’t forget to join us at TDS Europe 2016 in London (April 19-20) to hear more European travel trends