How to get a Hotel Website on a Smartphone & Mobilize Bookings

Just when you think you have got a great website the market shifts and pulls the rug right out from under your feet.More and more travelers are using smartphones to find vacation options, deals and to make holiday decisions. The growth of this market is phenomenal.

You may think that Travelers are happy looking at your website scrunched up to fit their iPhone or Android screen, but this is not the case. Its just too difficult to navigate.

The picture here is an example of a website booking engine on iPhone. Travellers can navigate around it, but they will not bother when it much easier to book another resort with a smartphone application.

The smart phone hotel booking app. is designed from the ground up. In many cases the options may be simplified and broken down into smaller parts which each fit the screen.

Hotel and tourism Websites site too must be rethought. The existing adage that a website is where you put all your information and pictures will not work on smartphones and mobile devices without considerable re-engineering. Smartphone travellers are not armchair vacationers for the most part. They are people on the move looking for quick answers. They need concise summaries of information and instant facts devoid of frills and unnecessary details.

Many smartphone tourist are looking for local information. Tourists use their phone on location. They lookup attractions, restaurants, activities and try to get a feel for the place. They dont want reems of pictures and text. They want to know what it is, where it is and how do i contact you or make a reservation.

Travellers also use smartphones before they travel. As we develop better applications for mobile travelers, many more are reaching into their pockets to view offers and options. Its easy, it convenient, its sharable, its immediate. It beats going to the office or sitting in front of a desktop, so long as the applications are navigational and deliver the right information.

If you are a Hotel or tourism operator you need to consider the mobile and local market.

Two-thirds of the world‘s population has a mobile phone subscription—4 billion people—and there will be 5 billion wireless subscribers worldwide by the end of this year, according to some estimates.

"We look at mobile as a big part of our overall strategy — that ‘s an understatement", said Alex Barza, New York-based mobile ad sales lead at Google.

Get a quote for your own Smartphone website with mobile bookings

Alex Barza Insights

Mobile will create the ability to individually target more people than any other channel,
Mobile will soon have more reach than TV, radio or the Internet.
Mobile is the access point to the Internet in the developing world.

Here are the facts

Morgan Stanley recently predicted that more users will access the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within five years.

Market researcher IDC is even more bullish, predicting that this is going to happen sooner than that—by 2013.

Google has seen a 500 % growth in mobile search from 2008 to 2010 and a 67 %
increase in mobile queries in the last quarter alone.

• Almost 1/3 of smartphone users who search for local businesses via mobile end up visiting or calling the location.

• Approximately one in three Android and iPhone owners discovered at least 2 new businesses in the first quarter as a result of using the local search on their phone.

• The most popular types of information being looked for is an address, more information on a business in the area and a phone number.
Source: Q1 2010 Smartphone Intelligence survey by Kantar Media’s Compete.

• Mobile has the broadest reach of users. Mobile 4.8 billion vs. Internet 1.7 billion users
www.marketer.com

We have hotel and tourism clients who tells us that the travelers attitude is chaining. "It all about instant gratification now, people on theirr mobile expect you to be there - its like they just dropped into your office. We have to be able top respond immediately!"

Check out the resources below.

The Resources below contain links to sites that will help you plan your smartphone strategy, or at least understand what is involved, just as we are doing in order to serve our hotel and tourism clients.