Since rolling out a responsive design in June, online travel agency Travelocity has seen iOS bookings increase six percent and Android reservations spike eight percent.

The online travel agency recently rolled out a responsive design site to tackle some of the fragmentation issues around mobile Web. Similar to other online travel agencies, Travelocity also sees a bigger upcoming opportunity with mobile to move beyond solely focusing on sales and ticketing.

“In terms of mobile, we’ve been focusing in on responsive Web design and making sure that customers have a great experience on whatever device they are on over the past six months,” said Josh Bright, product manager of mobile at Travelocity, Southlake, TX.

“We released responsive design in June and have been doing some testing,” he said. “We also saw really great trends with devices that we were not targeting previously.”

“Ultimately, I don’t think anyone sees this device proliferation slowing down, it’s only going to get more fragmented.”

Seamless travels
According to Mr. Bright, Travelocity began eyeing responsive design six months ago, and the new site has led to increases in conversions across the major operating systems.

In particular, conversions from Samsung’s Galaxy series has seen the largest increase in the past couple of months, which the company attributes to its new responsive design.

Right now, the responsive design is only rolled out for the hotel portion of Travelocity’s services, and flight information designed responsively will roll out in the next month or so.

Interestingly, tablet traffic to the site is not substantially more than smartphone traffic.

Instead, tablet users spend more time with the company’s app. Travelocity’s iPad app has 10 times longer user sessions than smartphone apps, showing that consumers are spending significant amounts of time with the app, likely when they are at home and are able to browse more.

Similar to other recent reports, Travelocity has seen a drop off in traffic coming from Amazon’s Kindle Fire.

Although iOS still rakes in the most traffic for Travelocity, Android traffic is also growing.

More than bookings
Travelocity has invested quite a bit in mobile in the past few years.

Most recently, the brand rolled out a feature to its mobile app that leverages image recognition to let consumers enter their credit card information more quickly (see story).

Additionally, an executive at Mobile Commerce Daily’s Mcommerce Summit in 2012 said that 60-70 percent of mobile bookings are made for same-night stays (see story).

Mr. Bright believes that although the online travel space has been successful with mobile and digital from a transactional standpoint, there is still a ways to go in other areas of the travel experience.

“I think that the next opportunity is to assist customers when they are out on their trips,” Mr. Bright said. “For example, providing information that helps guide them to additional information on the trip.”

Final Take
Lauren Johnson is associate reporter on Mobile Commerce Daily, New York