Travel tech: Travel buyers stick to the browser

South Africans do most of their online shopping on smartphones, yet are more than twice as likely to buy a flight or hotel through a web browser as through a mobile app.

The figures come from the new Online Retail in South Africa 2026 study, released by World Wide Worx in partnership with Mastercard, Peach Payments and Ask Afrika on Wednesday. It found that 57.9% of online shoppers use a smartphone for shopping, more than double the 26% who use laptops.

The study included Ask Africa’s Target Group Index (TGI), based on 23,910 interviews. We went back into that data for a closer look at travel, and found a startling contrast to shopping in general. Among online shoppers, 12.8% said they bought holidays and travel, defined as hotels and flights, through a browser. Only 5.1% said they bought these through an app.

Of the 48 types of products and service covered by the question, only clothing had a bigger browser lead over app purchasing. That puts travel among the clearest examples of a South African habit that tends to get lost in the rush to build an app for everything.

The travel industry gives customers plenty of reasons to install apps. They hold boarding passes and booking details, push flight updates and make check-in easier. However, airline apps are especially useful mainly after someone has bought a ticket. The sale itself? Not as much.

Anyone who has searched for a flight will have a theory. Travel buyers compare dates and fares, often moving between airlines and booking services. Browsers make that easy, whereas single-airline or hotel group apps do not enable comparison shopping.

The rest of the study provides a further clue. Almost 30% of online shoppers say the internet helps them research products, and 24.7% check several sources before buying. That tells us people still value the open web for research.

It should concern any airline or hotel group giving its app too much priority over its website. Awkward mobile sites have certainly lost me as a customer well before the app got a chance to store a reservation number.

Older customers would be the obvious explanation for the browser preference, but the age figures do not support it. Only 4.2% of online shoppers aged 15 to 24 buy travel through an app. The 25-to-34 group leads at 6.4%, but even among them the app remains a minority route.

Online travel purchasing is unusually even across the four age groups below 65. The figures run from 14.8% among 15-to-24-year-olds to 17.2% for those aged 25 to 34. People aged 35 to 44 record 15.7%, while the 45-to-64 group is at 16.4%.

This is quite different from online shopping overall, where 25-to-34-year-olds are the strongest market. Their online-shopping penetration of 39.5% leads every other age group. Once South Africans are already shopping online, the age gap in buying travel almost vanishes until 65, when it drops to 6.7%.

Gender has almost no effect on online travel purchasing. Men have higher online-shopping penetration overall, at 36.9% compared with 31.7% for women. For holidays and travel, the rates are 15.64% among male online shoppers and 15.59% among women. Among the categories bought by at least 10% of online shoppers, that is the narrowest gender difference of all.

Luggage follows a different pattern. Whereas 6.8% of female online shoppers buy it online, only 3.7% of South African men do. That tells us little about who travels more, but much about who prefers to kick the tyres, or rather the tiny wheels, before they pull the trolley case away.

Pretoria leads the major metros, with 22.7% of its online shoppers buying travel online. Greater Johannesburg follows at 18.4%, just ahead of Cape Town at 17.9%, while Durban records 11.5%. Does that say something about which citiers have the most people needing to

Travel also competes comfortably with the goods that dominate online retail. At 15.6% of online shoppers who buy holidays or travel online, it occupies a tight band between gift buying at 16%, footwear at 15.3% and electronic goods at 15.2%.

The browser-app gap is large enough to influence where travel companies spend their technology budgets. Apps have a strong role in check-in and managing a trip after purchase, while the sales channel still depends heavily on a good old browser.

* Download the full Online Retail in South Africa 2026 report here.

* Arthur Goldstuck is CEO of World Wide Worx, editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za and GadgetWings, and author of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to AI – The African Edge”.