How to improve content consumption and engagement on your travel and hospitality sites

In travel and hospitality (T&H), your digital experience is the first impression. Before a guest steps foot in a hotel or boards a flight, they’re already judging your brand through the content on your site. And the competition for their attention is fierce.

Mobile is now the traveler’s go-to gateway—driving a 5.5% surge in mobile content consumption. Yet, here’s the catch: overall content engagement has slipped by 5.5% across all devices. In other words, more people are showing up on smaller screens, but fewer are staying to truly connect with your content.

That gap is costly. Why? Because returning visitors consume 31% more pages and stay 1.5 minutes longer than first-timers. If your content doesn’t captivate new visitors immediately, you may never get the chance to turn them into loyal, high-value guests.

With Contentsquare, you can transform fleeting clicks into meaningful journeys—making sure every page, every second, and every interaction counts. This article shows you how.

Key data points for travel & hospitality

Our  2025 Digital Experience Benchmarks report reveals the current state of travel digital experiences:

• Traffic is on the rise in T&H, showing a +2.5% increase

• However, organic search traffic has fallen by -3% (from 32% to 28.9%). This indicates a shift in how travelers discover their destinations

• Paid social traffic surged by +50% year-over-year, now accounting for 4% of total visits (up from 3.1%)

• Despite this, it leads to high bounce rates, affecting nearly 7 out of 10 visitors

• While overall content consumption across T&H sites dipped by -5.5%, mobile content consumption soared by +5.5%, showing gains across page views, scroll rate, and time on site.

• Returning visitors are significantly more engaged, viewing +31% more pages and spending 1.5 minutes longer on-site than first-time users

• Frustration affects nearly half of all T&H site visits (44.4%), making it one of the highest rates across all industries

• Slow page loads (17.1%) and JavaScript errors (18%) are major contributors to user frustration

• Overall conversion rates declined by -8%. New customers are the hardest to convert, with their conversion rate falling by -2.5%.

• Despite lower traffic and engagement, desktop converts at 5.95%, more than double mobile’s 2.72%

• 30-day mobile web retention climbed from 4.6% to 5.6%, a +21.5% boost, signaling mobile’s increased importance in travel

3 strategies to boost engagement and content consumption on your travel and hospitality site

 1.  Optimize the user experience with behavioral insights

To begin, use Contentsquare Heatmaps to analyze user behavior. This powerful visual tool provides a deep understanding of user interactions on your site, showing you exactly where travelers click, tap, and scroll.

Contentsquare offers several types of heatmaps to give you a complete picture of user engagement:

• Click maps reveal where users click most frequently, including attempts to interact with non-clickable elements like hotel images they expect to expand

• Scroll maps show how far down the page users scroll before dropping off, helping you optimize content placement

• Move heatmaps track cursor movement patterns to understand user attention and hesitation points

• Zone-Based Heatmaps provide advanced metrics like conversion rates, revenue attribution, and engagement levels for each page element

Run a heatmap analysis to see which content is most engaging and where visitors may be getting stuck in forms, allowing you to optimize those areas for a better user experience.

For travel and hospitality sites, heatmaps reveal critical booking journey insights. You can identify whether travelers are clicking on non-interactive elements like hotel images they expect to expand, or struggling with search filters and booking CTAs across different devices. Since travelers often research on mobile but book on desktop, heatmaps help you understand these cross-platform behaviors and seasonal engagement patterns.

Most importantly, heatmaps reveal friction points in your booking funnel that traditional analytics miss.

⚡️Real-world impact: Eurostar’s success story 

Heatmaps helped Thalys (now Eurostar) by visually demonstrating how users interacted with their website, which led to two key improvements that significantly boosted their conversion rate.

Key findings from heatmap analysis

1. Revealing a poorly performing banner: the heatmap analysis showed that a promotional banner had a very low exposure rate of just 10.6%. This insight, along with a low click rate of 1.10%, revealed that its placement was ineffective.

2. Exposing user frustration in the checkout funnel: Contentsquare's analysis, including heatmaps, highlighted that users were repeatedly clicking on the payment methods section during checkout. This high click recurrence pointed to user confusion, as the icons were for information only, not for selection.

The results: by using the data from these analyses, Thalys was able to make data-driven decisions to move the banner higher on the page and remove the confusing payment messaging. These changes delivered impressive results:

• +500% increase in conversion rate, from 2.9% to 17.4%

• +265% increase in exposure rate on the promotional banner, from 10.6% to 38.7%

• -49% decrease in click recurrence, from 18.5% to 9.38%

This case study demonstrates how heatmap insights identify specific friction points and lead to measurable improvements in user experience and business outcomes.

Session Replay offers a visual re-creation of user journeys, providing critical context for identifying friction points and successful pathways. By leveraging these tools, you can streamline the user experience, making it easier for visitors to find what they need and complete their booking journey, thereby turning a first click into a lasting engagement.

💡 Find key insights in seconds: no time to watch full replays? With Session Replay Summaries, Contentsquare’s AI (Sense) highlights the most impactful customer moments instantly. This means you can quickly spot friction, uncover opportunities, and act faster to optimize your travel and hospitality experiences. 

2. Personalize the traveler's journey across channels and devices

Travelers have diverse intentions, and a one-size-fits-all approach no longer works. Journey Analysis and User Segments help you map how different visitors move through your site and dynamically group them based on their behavior, allowing for personalized experiences.

 Unlike traditional analytics that show ideal funnels, Journey Analysis reveals the actual paths users take—including unexpected routes, looping behaviors, and drop-off points that you might never have anticipated. You can analyze up to 21 steps in a visual Sunburst view and compare journeys side by side to understand how different personas interact with your site. Since travelers often research on mobile but book on desktop, this cross-device insight is crucial for creating seamless experiences that convert browsers into bookers.

Furthermore, Contentsquare's Acquisition Analysis capability pinpoints which marketing channels bring the most valuable visitors, enabling you to tailor content to meet their expectations. By understanding the complete customer journey, including cross-session and cross-device behavior, you can identify content that drives long-term value and loyalty.

⚡️Real-world impact: TUI’s success story 

TUI Cruises analyzed the behavior patterns of three key segments: families, couples, and solo travelers, and discovered that many users left multiple browser tabs open while researching cruises. 

By implementing custom tab messaging with targeted content for each segment, they achieved a remarkable +28% increase in family users returning to complete their bookings. This approach works because it recognizes that different traveler types have distinct research patterns and decision-making timelines, from business travelers who convert quickly to leisure travelers who may research for weeks before booking.

Watch TUI’s success story here:

3. Leverage AI and proactive monitoring to reduce friction

Digital frustration, often caused by technical issues and poor performance, directly impacts engagement and conversions. Utilize AI-powered tools to proactively detect and resolve these issues. For example, Contentsquare’s Frustration Score feature identifies pages or sessions where users are struggling, while Error Analysis and AI-powered Session Replay Summaries quickly diagnose and prioritize technical problems like JavaScript and API errors. 

The Speed Analysis Lab helps you improve web performance by identifying bottlenecks that cause slow page loads. These capabilities, along with AI Alerts bring your attention to unusual metric variations, allowing you to efficiently identify and fix issues. This creates a smoother, more reliable experience that keeps travelers on your site and increases conversions. 

From that first click to lasting connections

Improving content consumption isn’t just about keeping people on the page longer; it’s about removing friction, anticipating intent, and ensuring each digital touchpoint builds confidence. With behavioral insights, journey analysis, and AI-driven tools like session replay summaries, you can see what travelers actually experience and act quickly to optimize it.

Do this well, and your website becomes more than a booking engine—it becomes part of the travel experience itself, turning first impressions into lasting relationships.