Net Affinity’s booking engine processes and analyses tons of bookings every day. Looking at that data, we realized we’re sitting on a whole lot of data on booking patterns. The pile of gold beneath the mountain of numbers. So, we decided to do a little digging to see if we found something shiny.

Today, we’re sharing, for free, the most interesting booking patterns of the last quarter of a million bookings to go through our booking engine. We’re telling you who books,howthey book, and when they book.

The most surprising feature, to us, was the fact that over one-fifth of all bookings were made on mobile. That’s extremely significant, and way up from where our data had mobile bookings a year ago.

Why is it such a big deal? It’s one more piece of the puzzle confirming the shouting that every digital marketing blog and company – yes, ours too! – has been doing for the past few years about the mobile revolution.

Mobile is important, both in the wider field of travel and for independent hotels. Mobile bookings aren’t a phenomenon for big chains or OTAs to claim alone – they’re sweeping independent hoteliers too. This is partially due to more hotels making sure their websites are responsive on mobile and optimising for conversions on those devices. It also has to do with technology improving, potential guests getting more comfortable with their phones and tablets, and the many and varied ways there now are to pay on mobile.

We’ve also uncovered booking patterns by age, by gender, by month, and much more. For the rest of the valuable data we dug up in our analysis, check out the infographic