Women pay less for flights, report reveals

Women pay an average of 2% less for their flight tickets than men, a new reported has revealed.

In its latest white paper, entitled “Gender differences in booking business travel”, Carlson Wagonlit Travel (CWT) found that women achieve their savings by booking their flights on average 1.9 days earlier than men. The study analysed 6.4 million flight bookings.

And the financial implications of these findings are significant, according to CWT. For companies with 1,000 business travellers, the difference – and therefore the potential saving – is just under US$50,000 a year. That rises to US$1 million for companies with a traveller base of 20,000 people.

CWT’s Solutions Group worked with leading academics from Ohio State University and Arizona State University to analyse its booking data. Using advanced statistical techniques they were able to quantify a direct link between gender and flight booking patterns.

Other findings include the fact that people tend to book flights further in advance the older they are. Between the ages of 30 and 70 years, the average booking lead time increases by approximately five days for both genders.

Additionally, as people’s flying frequency increases, they typically book flights closer to their departure date. Interestingly, the gender gap almost disappears among the most frequent travellers.

CWT said these data analysis techniques could also be used to examine other areas of travel, improving how companies understand traveller behaviour.

“This analysis technique opens up a whole new range of opportunities in the quest for personalised travel,” said Catalin Ciobanu, CWT’s senior director of data & analytics. “It can also be applied to many other types of traveller segmentation, including geography, booking channel used, or individual business unit, for example. Ultimately, by knowing our travellers better we can improve both their experience, as well as the effectiveness and efficiency of corporate travel programmes.”