Analyzing Consumer Behavior And Decision-Making Patterns In Digital Travel Platforms: A Comparative Study Of Service Integration And User Preferences

Abstract

During the pandemic, there was a continuous drop in booking volume FD revenue of airlines and OTAs globally as travel restrictions were put in place. As personal and financial circumstances changed, some consumers retrieved their travel products and fully chose refunds. However, there was a short-lived boom of recovered booking volumes in airlines and OTAs within the third quarter and a thread of recovery for the large intercontinental markets from the fourth quarter of 2020 onward. Such market changes are strongly stock-market driven rather than actual performance-driven due to mass vaccination, rebounding domestic travel accessibility, and the formulations of worldwide travel bubbles throughout 2021. There is a lack of thorough, comprehensive, and continuous rendering of macro-level understanding concerning such phenomena in a quantifiable manner. Hence, this research attempts to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the stock market reactions to the recovering travel industry in different domains of airlines, online travel agents, and countries in terms of sentiment expressions and trends.
Last but not least, amidst the relentless competition from OTAs, airlines’ product offers have shifted from almost pure traditional freight tickets to the considerable cross-selling of travel ancillary products with significance on how well non-flight products could supplement their revenue and buffer the loss of crashed passenger revenues.