Role of Digital in Travel Spending

Planning and booking — and especially paying for — trips used to be a largely analog affair.

Paper-based brochures and travel guides in hand, with excited phone calls to travel agents. Signed contracts, paper checks, navigating across everything from airlines to tour guides — it all was time consuming, to say the least.

The shift to online channels to manage the traveling experience, in effect getting online as one cements plans to get away from it all, is also marked by a digital shift in payments.

In the report, “How People Pay: Payment Choice Depends on Shopping Channel,” we found a widespread movement across more than 2,700 consumers to translate everyday and often cumbersome tasks to online, self-service interactions that save time, allow for some comparison shopping, and efficient, transparent payment modalities.

As we’ve noted in past coverage, the generational gap that has historically existed between younger and older generations has been closing,…