According to the results from an Asian hotel booking website survey, smartphones are key to good vacations.
An Asian hotel booking website, Agoda.com, has conducted a study regarding travel habits and behaviors of people around the world, and what they found was that people from Asia feel that mobile technology is the most important thing to remember when on a vacation.
The majority of westerners feel the same way about remembering their credit cards.
The website held the survey online during February 2014 and involved the participation of more than 50,000 of the site’s customers. These individuals were from countries around the world and were asked what item they would least like to forget to bring on vacation with them. Asian travelers chose their mobile technology, hands down. Western travelers clearly felt different about the most important item that they would need to bring.
This helps to demonstrate the importance of mobile technology to the average person in Asia.
Among the travelers from Asia, 45 percent said that their smartphones were the one item that they would most hate to forget when going on vacation. In second place was credit cards, which were chosen by 29 percent of the votes from that region. Europeans and Americans, on the other hand, said that credit cards were more important to remember than their cell phones.
The responses from the European travelers said that credit cards were most important to 47 percent of them. Among Americans, that figure was 44 percent. Only 19 percent of respondents from Europe and North American said that mobile devices were the most important.
Survey participants from France showed the largest disparity between the importance of credit cards and mobile technology. Fifty eight percent felt that credit cards were the top thing that they would not want to forget to pack, while only 9 percent were concerned about remembering their smartphones.
In Asia, the only country that showed an exception to the rule where mobile devices came first was among the respondents from Japan. There, 38 percent chose their credit cards first while 28 percent selected their cell phones.
As people in that country are often focused on discussing – or complaining about – the weather, and as the Christmas season saw a massive ice storm blanketing the center and eastern portion of the country, it is no mystery as to why many people would be looking to those applications the most frequently, particularly over the last little while.