New research suggests that U.S. travel bookings through smartphones may have doubled in the past year, as more travelers buy the devices and more suppliers and travel intermediaries produce a broader range of travel apps. Almost 40% of the nearly 2,400 smartphone users surveyed byAtmosphere Research Group said they intended to use their mobile device to book a hotel stay, while 27% indicated a willingness to use their iPhones to reserve hotel rooms, book car rentals and buy airplane tickets. More than a third of online travelers are interested in actually sealing the deal
Granted, the Atmosphere Research study, indicated that smartphone owners are still more likely to use the devices to perform same-day travel activities, such as making a restaurant reservation or buying theater tickets, than they are to purchase a hotel room or plane ticket.
Orbitz said 9% of its first-quarter hotel bookings had been made on mobile devices. That was more than double the figures for the same quarter in 2011. More than half of Orbitz’s hotel bookings through mobile devices are for same-night stays, indicating that smartphones are becoming an especially effective way for travelers to secure last-minute deals. It isn’t just about looking at stuff on the mobile device and doing the serious business on the computer at home. Mobile has the ability to provide travel-planning on the fly.
More than 145 million smartphones were shipped globally during the first quarter, up 41% from a year earlier, research firm Strategy Analytics said in April. Last year, smartphone shipments jumped 58% from 2010, to 472 million units, and accounted for almost a third of all mobile devices sold, research firm Gartner reported in February. As a result of the devices’ snowballing popularity, mobile has been having a huge impact in the travel-shopping arena.
In a June 13 webinar, PhoCusWright reported that last year, mobile leapfrogged print publications and travel brochures when it came to methods prospective travelers used to shop for their trips. In 2011, 16% of those surveyed by PhoCusWright used their mobile device to shop for trips, up from 11% in 2010, while the percentage of those shopping through print publications fell from 18% to 13%.
At stake is what’s expected to be a growing chunk of the expanding U.S. online travel market. Annual U.S. online leisure bookings, which account for about 40% of total bookings, will jump to about $124 billion in 2012, from $109 billion last year, PhoCusWright predicted in a report released last November. And while PhoCusWright estimated that mobile accounted for less than 1% of total travel bookings last year, that figure could jump to more than 4% of total bookings by the end of this year.
With these data, it is clear that while the globe grapples with uncertain economic realities, «mobile» appears to be gold, and not only in the Travel Industry. Facebook is expected to announce their uniquely targeted mobile advertising model before the end of the month. Amazon is talking to Chinese manufacturer Fox Conn with ambitions of building their own mobile device to serve as a compliment to Amazon’s considerable digital ecosystem of products and services. China itself has surpassed the US as the world’s dominant smartphone market with over a billion subscribers and roughly 400 million mobile web users. Advisory firm IDC predicts that by 2014 there will have been over 76 billion mobile apps downloaded resulting in an app economy worth an estimated thirty five billion in the same year.
David Armano, in his excellent article «The Future Isn’t About Mobile; It’s About Mobility» says that there will be blood as the business world pursues the mobile gold rush, once again. It happened in the early days of the web, until organizations realized that maintaining a website that provided real value was more difficult than launching something quickly; it is happening now in social — getting something launched on Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest is easy, but building an engaged and meaningful following isn’t; and it will happen in mobile if companies take a «channel» approach vs. a behavioral approach. In short, as Armano defends, it’s not about mobile as much as it is about understanding mobility.
As Armano explains, Mobility means information, convenience, and social all served up on the go, across a variety of screen sizes and devices and is radically different from the stationary «desktop» experience. In some cases, mobility is a «lean back» experience like sitting on a commuter train watching a video. In other cases it can be «lean forward» — like shopping for a gift while you take your lunch break at the park. And in many cases, it’s «lean free» when your body is in motion, or you’re standing in line scanning news headlines or photos from friends while you wait for your turn to be called.
The difference between mobility and mobile is like the difference between hardware and software. Mobile is linked to devices — it is always one thing, wherever it is. But mobility changes with context: cultures incorporate mobile technologies differently. Mobility is the context which determines if it all works together or doesn’t.
Thus, a company, before becoming «mobile», must improve its understanding of the nuances of mobility and mobile behaviours before ramping up the investment in mobile. First, it must realize that going mobile is not the same thing as having an app. In fact, avoid the temptation to «app everything.» A lot of content — whether video or text-based — can easily be optimized for mobile consumption. Popular apps such as Flipboard or Pulse point to a future of consumer «appgregation» — using one app to aggregate many sources of content-. Instead of creating a whole host of apps that few are likely to download, invest in making your «digital ecosystem» more mobile-friendly.
Second, never put mobile tactics in front of strategy. Something «mobile» only is reasonable whether it makes sense for the long-term business goals of the company and is what their users want or will actually want. Mobility should be analysed as a behaviour and lifestyle, and from there it must be put in perspective with the company business. For that reason understanding data like that smartphones are most likely to be embraced as a booking tool by the youngest adult travel group, whose travel-spending habits are more volatile than those of older groups, is incredibly relevant. PhoCusWrightestimated the typical traveler age 18 to 24 spent $2,718 on travel in 2011. While that number trailed the overall adult average of $3,109, it marked a 19% jump from a year earlier.
Clearly depending on how they play the mobility game, the impact of the growth of mobile bookings on the battle for distribution share between suppliers and intermediaries will be different. Some defends that single-purpose suppliers such as hotel chains might have an opportunity to boost reservations through mobile devices by appealing to loyalty members and producing smartphone apps that streamline the reservation process. Others pitch OTAs as the easiest method for mobile travel booking, as Smartphone users without the luxury of a large screen, full keyboard and multiple windows will be more likely to book through OTA apps that enable one-stop bookings for hotels, car rentals and airplane reservations. And Carroll Rheem, with her characteristic global vision, says that «Disruptive technologies are continuing to change behaviors and preferences.”
Wrapping up, mobile is not just a channel to boost sales, it must be much more, actually it should change completely the procedures of the company as operations and customer services should be fuelled by the new mobile technologies, following and answering to the new behavioural patterns of the clients. It remind me my old days of Business Process Reengineering (BPR) implementations in the early 90s, where the key was not to automated existing processes but to rethink from scratch the whole relationship with the external and internal client, taking advantage of the new technologies. So,Nihil novo sub sole, but, at the end, execution is everything.
