Post-Pandemic Travel Apps: What Travellers Really Want Now

Travel apps used to be simple tools for booking flights and hotels, but the pandemic changed what people expect from their travel technology completely... and if you're building a travel app now without understanding these new expectations, you're likely wasting a lot of money on features that nobody really wants or uses. Over the past few years, I've worked with several travel and hospitality clients who needed to rethink their entire approach to mobile experiences, and what we've learned is that travellers aren't just looking for convenience anymore, they're looking for confidence, flexibility and control over every part of their journey in ways they never did before.

The most successful travel apps now focus on reducing anxiety rather than just reducing steps in a booking process.

Look, the basic functionality still matters (nobody wants a slow, confusing booking flow) but the apps that are actually retaining users and seeing strong engagement metrics are the ones that understand how fundamentally the relationship between travellers and travel has shifted. Building a travel app that works in this environment means understanding not just what people want to do, but what makes them feel safe enough to actually book that trip in the first place.

The New Reality of Travel After the Pandemic

The numbers tell an interesting story about how travel behaviour has changed, with average booking windows shrinking from 90 days to around 45-60 days for leisure travel, meaning people are making decisions much closer to their departure dates than they used to. At Glance, we've seen this play out in the data from our travel clients... conversion rates for bookings made within two weeks of travel have gone up by roughly 40% whilst longer-term bookings have dropped significantly.

What this really means is that travellers are staying in a research and monitoring phase much longer, checking prices and availability repeatedly before committing, and they're doing this primarily on mobile devices whilst they're doing other things throughout their day. The apps that accommodate this behaviour (with features like price tracking, saved searches and quick rebooking of previously viewed options) are seeing much better engagement than those that treat every session as a fresh start.

• Shorter booking windows mean less time to build trust through traditional marketing
• Multiple research sessions before purchase are now standard behaviour
• Mobile notifications about price changes drive 3-4 times more conversions than email
• Flexibility is valued more highly than price for a large segment of travellers

Health and Safety Features That Matter Most

When we first started adding health-related features to travel apps, there was a tendency to go overboard with information that made the booking experience feel clinical and overwhelming, which actually decreased conversions because people felt more anxious rather than less. The thing is, travellers do want health information but they want it presented in a way that helps them make decisions rather than just listing every possible concern or requirement.

The features that get the most use are surprisingly simple ones... real-time entry requirements based on the traveller's departure country and vaccination status, crowd density indicators for attractions and transport, and clear information about cancellation terms if they get sick before or during their trip. We built a health dashboard for a hotel booking client that shows this information upfront during the search phase, and it reduced customer service enquiries by about 35% whilst actually improving booking rates.

Store vaccination cards, test results and health declarations directly in your app rather than making users dig through emails or photos when they need them, this single feature gets mentioned in user reviews more than almost any other.

Contactless Technology and Digital Solutions

Here's the reality about contactless features... they were adopted quickly out of necessity but they're sticking around because they genuinely make the travel experience faster and less frustrating, not just because of health concerns. Mobile check-in, digital room keys and contactless payments aren't pandemic features anymore, they're just table stakes for any modern travel app.

The mistake some developers make is treating these as separate bolt-on features rather than integrating them into the core user journey. When we rebuilt a hotel chain's app, we made the entire check-in to room entry process work without ever opening multiple screens or switching between different parts of the app... guests tap one button when they arrive, confirm their room number and get a digital key that works straight away.

That sounds simple but it required rethinking the entire backend architecture to handle real-time communication between the app, the property management system and the door lock systems. The technical complexity is quite high (you're dealing with multiple APIs, offline functionality requirements and security concerns) but the user experience needs to feel effortless. We're talking about authentication tokens, encrypted key generation and local device storage that works even when the hotel wifi is patchy, which requires bulletproof security implementation throughout the entire system.

1. Design for offline-first functionality so contactless features work in lifts and basements
2. Build in fallback options because digital systems do fail occasionally
3. Test extensively on older devices since not everyone has the latest phone
4. Keep the interface dead simple with visual confirmation at every step

Flexible Booking and Cancellation Options

Flexibility has become such a deciding factor in travel bookings that it often outweighs price considerations, which is something we never would have said a few years ago... and this has massive implications for how you structure your booking flows and filter systems. When we analyse conversion funnels for travel apps now, we consistently see that users who filter by cancellation terms first convert at higher rates than those who filter by price first, which tells you something about what's driving decision-making.

Travellers will often pay 20-30% more for a fully refundable option, which means your app's interface needs to make these choices clear and comparable at a glance.

The technical challenge here is that flexible booking options are usually more complex to process on the backend, involving different rate codes, varying deposit requirements and conditional refund calculations that depend on when the cancellation happens. For a tour operator client, we built a system that calculates and displays the refund amount in real-time as users select different cancellation dates, which sounds straightforward but required pulling data from multiple supplier APIs with different terms and conditions. This kind of integration can create complications that API integration failures often highlight.

What really matters is transparency... showing exactly what happens in different scenarios (cancel tomorrow versus cancel next month) without making users read through paragraphs of policy text. Visual timelines work well here, showing key dates and the corresponding refund percentage at each point. And for apps that serve both consumers and businesses, you need different flexibility options for different user types because a family booking a holiday has very different needs from a business traveller booking a work trip.

Real-Time Information and Communication

Travel is inherently unpredictable, which means your app needs to handle changes and problems gracefully rather than just being a booking tool that goes silent after purchase. The apps that maintain high engagement and positive reviews are the ones that communicate proactively about delays, gate changes, traffic conditions and any other factors that affect the travel experience... and this requires proper push notification strategy rather than just blasting users with generic updates.

We learned this the hard way with a flight tracking app where our initial notification system sent too many alerts about minor changes, which led to users disabling notifications entirely and then missing the information they actually needed. The solution was building smarter filtering logic that considers the user's context (are they currently travelling or just monitoring a future trip) and the severity of the change (a five-minute delay isn't worth a notification but a gate change definitely is).

• Location-aware notifications work better than time-based ones for travel apps
• Give users granular control over what triggers notifications
• Include actionable information in notifications, not just alerts about problems
• Build in-app messaging for situations too complex for push notifications
• Maintain notification history so users can reference past alerts

The technical infrastructure for this is quite demanding because you're potentially dealing with millions of data points updating constantly (flight statuses, traffic conditions, weather alerts) and you need to process all of that to determine what matters to each specific user. We use a combination of third-party APIs and custom logic engines that filter and prioritise information based on the user's itinerary, preferences and current location, and having debugging tools in place is essential when managing this complexity.

Personalised Local Experiences Over Mass Tourism

The shift towards wanting unique, less crowded experiences has been building for years but it accelerated significantly during and after the pandemic, and this creates both opportunities and challenges for travel apps. Users don't just want a list of the top ten attractions anymore, they want recommendations that match their interests, travel style and comfort level, which means you need much more sophisticated recommendation engines than a simple rating-based ranking system.

For an experience booking platform we developed, we built a preference engine that considers dozens of factors including past bookings, time spent viewing different categories, group size and even the day of the week they're travelling. The recommendations get better over time as the system learns more about the user's preferences... someone who consistently books food experiences but never books adventure activities should see very different suggestions from someone with the opposite pattern. Getting the onboarding process right is crucial here, as onboarding mistakes can derail user engagement from the start.

Let users explicitly tell you what they don't like, not just what they do like, because negative signals are often stronger and clearer than positive ones for improving recommendations.

Building Trust Through Transparency and Reviews

Trust is harder to build and easier to lose now than it was before the pandemic, particularly in travel where there were so many stories about difficult refunds, changed terms and companies going out of business. Your app needs to actively build confidence through transparency about policies, clear communication about what's included and not included, and authentic user reviews that aren't obviously filtered or manipulated. One effective approach is ensuring travel apps are easy to use when users need them most.

The review system architecture matters more than most developers realise... you need to verify that reviewers actually used the service, collect reviews at the right time (not immediately after booking but after the experience has happened), and present reviews in a way that helps users find information relevant to their specific concerns. We implemented a tagging system for one client where reviewers categorise their comments, which lets future users filter reviews by topics like accessibility, value for money or family-friendliness.

Response to negative reviews matters too, and this is where many travel companies get it wrong by being defensive or making excuses. Your app should make it easy for service providers to respond quickly and constructively to complaints, and you should surface these responses prominently because they show that problems get addressed. We've seen that properties with thoughtful responses to negative reviews actually convert better than properties with slightly higher ratings but no responses. The visual presentation also matters significantly - understanding what your app's first screenshot should show can help build trust before users even download.

• Show verification badges for reviews from confirmed bookings
• Display response rates and times for service providers
• Let users mark reviews as helpful to surface the most useful ones
• Include photos from real users alongside professional marketing images
• Be transparent about how reviews are collected and moderated

Conclusion

The travel apps that succeed now are the ones that understand they're not just booking tools but confidence-building platforms that support users through uncertainty and change. What travellers really want is control, clarity and flexibility delivered through interfaces that feel reassuring rather than overwhelming... and getting that balance right requires thinking carefully about every interaction, every notification and every piece of information you present. Before starting development, it's worth calculating your app's success probability to ensure you're addressing the right user needs.

Building a travel app that meets these expectations isn't a simple project, it requires deep technical capability combined with real understanding of user psychology and behaviour under stress. The features that matter most aren't always the flashiest ones, they're the ones that reduce anxiety and give users confidence to actually complete bookings and have positive experiences they want to repeat. And that means focusing relentlessly on the details that make users feel looked after rather than just getting them through a transaction as quickly as possible.

If you're working on a travel app and need help thinking through these challenges, get in touch with us and we can talk about what might work best for your specific situation.

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