Buying flight via phone may cost you more

Since the first iPhone launched 15 years ago, consumer shopping habits have slowly but relentlessly shifted toward mobile devices. According to a survey of 3,250 U.S. consumers from Pymnts.com, the majority of travel service purchases (51.4 percent) were made on a mobile device in February 2022.

The trend is even starker among younger shoppers. About 48 percent of millennials ages 25 to 40 prefer using mobile phones for online shopping, compared with 34 percent of all shoppers globally, according to a 2021 survey of 13,000 shoppers from Klarna.

Indeed, some travel shopping services offer only in-app shopping for certain bookings.

However, while buying a flight on a phone is more convenient, it could be more costly.

The rise in mobile shopping in the past decade has coincided with a sea change in how travel brands earn revenue. Add-on fees, including baggage and seat selection fees on flights and cleaning and resort fees with lodging, have become more common and pricey.

But a 2021 study in the journal Marketing Science found that shoppers tend to make suboptimal decisions under these “drip pricing” situations, that is, when hidden fees are tacked on throughout the checkout process. Shoppers tend to compare initial prices across competitors, which are low, rather than the higher final price.

“When firms employ a drip pricing strategy, the initial price is almost always lower than a competitor’s all-in price,” Shelle Santana, assistant professor of marketing at Bentley University and one of the study’s authors, said in an email interview. “But once they start to add on amenities such as a checked bag, seat options, etc., that difference in price across firms diminishes and sometimes reverses.”

What surprised Santana and her colleagues was how unwilling customers were to compare alternatives, even after the final price had risen.

“Consumers perceive high search costs associated with starting their decision process over, and they think they will save less money than they actually will,” Santana said.

Shopping on mobile devices is quick and easy for simple purchases. Yet shopping for travel is far from simple, and it usually requires switching between several tabs and apps to find the best deal.

Consider the decision of whether to purchase a flight with cash or reward miles. This involves several steps. You’ll need to search on the airline app or website for award availability, likely while switching to a personal calendar to check dates. Then you’ll search on a third-party flight tool for estimated cash fares before determining the value of the redemption in miles versus dollars. Once you’ve determined the best option, you’ll need to navigate through the entire checkout process from both cash and award flight options to determine the true final price.

Maybe some fleetfingered Gen Zers can manage this task on a mobile device. But for many, it’s too daunting.

A 2018 study in the Journal of Marketing followed nearly a million sessions on a shopping website and found that shoppers who switched from a phone to computer completed their transactions at a higher conversion rate. And this rate effect was even more true for higher priced or risky products.

So even if you like scrolling for flights on your phone, or you feel overwhelmed by the mobile-based options, follow the advice of the experts who prefer booking travel — which can be expensive and risky — using a computer.