some great examples of mobile travel technology
November 13th, 2009
Entering the World Travel Market by SoMaFusion
This week the vast World Travel Market has been on at the ExCeL centre: a fascinating gathering of the travel business from around the world, with every country and major city represented as a tourist destination. Right at the back of one of the cavernous halls, up the back stairs, there is a long anonymous corridor, and off there is a room used for the much smaller but more interesting Travel Technology Summit, organised by EyeForTravel. As they used our lastminute.com mobile services as a case study recently, we were there to explain what we were up to.
My presentation followed the ideas in the case study, namely the 4 reasons we chose to reinvest in mobile in 2008:
- Availability of unlimited data rates
- Better browsers, now perfectly capable when necessary of dealing with desktop web pages
- Better screens, allowing a richer experience, particularly with the release this year of phones such as the Droid with its 854×480 resolution
- Easier location-sensing, with the availability of APIs via the iPhone or from Google or Skyhook, allowing a combination of GPS, cell or wifi positioning to allow reasonably fast and accurate location-sensing indoors and out, roaming or not.
When we looked at the market we decided to focus on 3 areas:
- Helpful services for travellers once they’ve made a booking, such as flight gate or delay information. Within the Sabre group there’s a team in Dallas working on this area and I’d urge you to try out their TripCase application.
- Bookings of lastminute.com products, that work on the go. Here we’ve started with restaurant bookings, as the simplest to book product from our portfolio, and one that is very useful when you’re out and about. Our fonefood mobile restaurant deals and booking service launched in 2008.
- Recommendations of great things to do in cities. This thread started with our exploration of augmented reality interfaces with our nru application, that launched in January this year. Since then we’ve been researching how to give people great deals nearby and great ideas of things to do, hence our upcoming launches of snaffle and topsee.
Lufthansa mobile site
Our two mobile co-presenters, Stefanie Heucke from Lufthansa and Chris LaRose from Hilton, both had fascinating presentations, and I would recommend their services as great examples of mobile travel technology. Lufthansa have been pushing the ideas of mobile check-in and mobile boarding passes for many years, and in the last couple of years these services have really taken off, with a growth of 11% per month (they’re now issuing 120000 mobile boarding passes a month, and get 2M mobile page views a month). Their online check-in is now up to 40% mobile vs. 60% desktop web. An interesting discovery they made around the sales side is that their mobile customers are not just after the last minute deals; they are looking for great prices primarily, and allowing a sort by price option on their mobile site doubled their sales a week after it launched. Reflecting our own experience, they’ve seen the majority of their traffic from iPhones, followed in their case by Blackberry (presumably the business travellers), whereas for us the number 2 spot is Nokia’s. Hilton have also seen massive growth recently, with a year on year improvement of 200-400%. For every $1 invested they have seen a $44 return in 2009. Great numbers for anyone thinking of investing in mobile travel technology!
December 3rd, 2009
Sofia for SoMaFusion says...I thought there were some great ideas and examples of tech used in the tourism industry services.
However, many solutions also require a good working relationship with authorities, e.g. Visit Britain. Whereas in the UK these organisations are in good working order it worries me that in other countries opportunities are missed because a central coordinating agency does not exist (or is a bit all over the place)
P.S. I LOVE that our picture is here