The latest online search data released by award winning digital marketing agency, Greenlight, reveals 21% of the 2.5 million UK consumer online searches for hotels in May, were made using mobile devices.  The majority, 59%, were for hotels in the UK, with London and York attracting the most queries.

The agency’s independent quarterly ‘ Hotels Sector Report – Issue 16 ’ profiles the most popular terms UK consumers used when they went to Google UK to look for hotels in domestic, short haul and long haul destinations in May, and charts the vendors who were most visible to those searches, on both computers (laptops/desktops) and mobile devices (tablets & smart phones).

According to the report, a total of 522,115 online searches were made for hotels using mobile devices.

‘Hotels’ was the most popular search term, accounting for 6% of mobile searches followed by ‘cheap hotels’ with 4%.

Searches pertaining to hotels in London accounted for 13% of the 307,786 online queries made via mobile devices for hotels in the UK, with the terms ‘hotels in london’, ‘cheap hotels in london’ and ‘london hotels’ being most commonly used to look online for them. Searches for hotels in York accounted for 3%.

Overall, laterooms.com, lastminute.com and tripadvisor.co.uk emerged as the three most visible sites for online searches made via mobiles for hotels in domestic, short-haul and long-haul destinations, achieving a 76%, 62% and 59% share of visibility, respectively, in the organic listings.*

However, the picture was different in the paid listings** which saw booking.com, hotels.com and secretescapes.com emerge as the most visible advertisers on mobile devices accounting for 91%, 73% and 47% share of visibility, respectively.

Other findings from the report show that queries for hotels in Amsterdam dominated short- haul destination searches on mobile devices whilst on computers it was Paris.

Meanwhile, on the long-haul front, searches for hotels in Dubai accounted for the majority of mobile-made queries whilst New York dominated hotel-related searches made using computers.