Learning from the travel sector

Julian Rogers looks at how the travel industry has adapted to mobile and asks what lessons the online gambling sector can learn from its success

Search the word ‘travel’ in Apple’s App Store and it spits out more than 20,000 results – everything from online travel agents and city guides through to foreign language courses and currency converter apps. It’s a chocka- block category. Travel companies are experiencing exponential growth on mobile, to a stage now where it’s nudging ahead of traditional online channels. And the emphasis on capturing and holding onto these tech-savvy travellers is more important than ever.

“Mobile is becoming a dominant channel for Travelzoo,” says the company’s senior director of mobile and social, Dave Ambrose. “In 2011, 11% of traffic and engagement came from mobile and now it’s over 40%, so it’s gone fo seen growth like that on any other platform.” Research this summer by mobile ad platform JiWire found that 52% of US consumers used a mobile device to book travel in the last 90 days. And close to half (44%) said they were willing to spend over $500 when booking travel using a smartphone or tablet with native apps preferred over mobile sites.

“The online travel space is very competitive and mobile takes that to another level,” Dan Craig, senior director of mobile marketing at Hotels.com, says. “In our mobile offerings we have always made sure we leverage the best parts of Hotels.com to make sure we appeal to new mobile customers as well as our existing users who are moving to mobile. Mobile-specific features, such as our mobile exclusive same day deals, really help to make our mobile app stand out from the crowd.”

Craig reveals big differences in the buying patterns of mobile users, the main one being that over 70% of sales on apps are same-day or next-day bookings. This could suggest mobile travellers are more impulsive or likely to make a snap decision once they have found a suitable hotel or flight within an app. And the on-going migration to mobile, either for booking holidays, flights, hotels and car hire or just perhaps researching a trip, has encouraged some travel operators to sidestep full-blown online sites to focus purely on mobile and native apps.

It just works

HotelTonight is the first room-booking app built specifically for mobile devices from the ground-up, which enables users to book same-day hotel stays. Since launching in 2010, the app has had seven million downloads, two million of which have been installed on European devices. Heather Leisman, managing director for the business in Europe, says about half of its customers are business travellers, while the other half are spontaneous leisure travellers who use HotelTonight for a special occasion or impulse trip.

“Amazingly, over 50% of our customers report that they didn’t need a hotel room when they woke up that morning,” Leisman says. Like almost all mobile sites and apps in any sector, travellers want the experiencerfold in two years. We haven’t to be simple, intuitive and fast. Mobileoptimised websites need to load quickly (fractions of a second count) otherwise the audience will vote with their thumbs and go elsewhere, suggests Ambrose.

“If you can’t focus on simplicity when building products for mobile then you will not succeed. Things need to be fast and responsive – you need content in a few seconds, especially on a small screen. You won’t go to that site again if it doesn’t load quickly.” Once a flight or hotel is booked, the process of reaching the checkout and paying should be seamless and with as few stages as possible. Speed can mean the difference between a sale and lost business. “With three swipes and a tap, users can go from opening the app to booking a hotel in less than 10 seconds,” says Leisman.

Likewise, ebookers says its customers are able to book a hotel with just three taps of a screen. At ebookers, more than a quarter of hotel bookings are made on mobile devices, while mobile customers are 65% more likely to make a repeat booking, according to Rob Define, senior director of international product strategy. He says mobile’s continuing potential is plain to see: “The future of travel is mobile. Next year, we expect 50% of our hotel bookings to be via mobile devices.”

The habitual customer

Define also identifies a couple of key differences between ebookers’ PC and mobile customers: “Mobile phone customers spend less than PC customers, purely because they are booking shorter duration trips. But they are booking more frequently, especially in our apps.” He says iOS customers were definitely more active in booking via mobile, but this is starting to change. “As Android has evolved and become a much stronger mobile platform, we have seen the two grow closer together in terms of shopping behaviour.”

Those eyeing up multi-stop flights, complex itineraries or specially tailored holidays probably aren’t going to use a smartphone. The desktop PC, laptop or tablet is more likely to be the preferred platform. But for straightforward trips or casual research, the immediacy and convenience of mobile fits the bill. “People want content right now at any day of the week, from any location,” Ambrose states. “If you cannot deliver that in travel then you will not survive. If we have poor content nobody would be using our product and then we won’t have any audience on mobile.”

Most travel sites report seeing a spike in activity on mobile devices around lunchtime. By its very nature, mobile also often translates into short bursts of activity, says Ambrose. “We see a general trend in travel where people are using tablets to get inspiration and browse. Think of the tablet as something for recreational or evening use and weekends, the laptop is daytime use and associated with work, and with mobile it’s in bursts throughout the day when people are truly on the move.”

Pick me

Define says customers certainly tend to use mobile as a research tool. “Customers are definitely browsing more and more on mobile, and then many times making a booking on a different device later. ebookers has done a lot of work to understand this cross-device activity so that we can understand how to invest our development and marketing resource. We are in the progress of making it as easy as possible for customers to search and book across multiple devices.”

Sometimes, though, travellers appreciate the simple things, such as being able to view a trip itinerary offline while abroad, cutting out the need for additional roaming charges. Airlines have had great success with mobile boarding cards, and information on gates. Or a device’s onboard GPS can be used to suggest accommodation in the vicinity to the user.

Expedia, for example, recently updated its app to provide travellers with real-time information and travel planning while on the move. Extras like this engage with customers and can lead to repeat business. However, a travel app first needs to be heard above the noise in a jam-packed app store and find its way onto a user’s device. The multinational travel brands boast the marketing muscle to reach the widest possible audience, but for smaller or new operators it’s especially challenging. Obviously, a great or innovative product helps.

“Good visibility is only achievable with a great product that differentiates itself from the competition,” suggests Leisman. Stephen Joyce, CEO of tour operator booking software company Rezgo, says the extent of an app’s prominence or ranking in a store can be the difference between a hit or a miss. “There are many examples of unknown apps becoming overnight hits thanks to an Apple App Store featured listing, but, of course, that depends greatly on the type of app you are producing and the types of travel products being sold within the app,” says Rezgo.

Driving app adoption

The larger brands like Expedia and Kayak can leverage their existing user bases to drive app adoption, although smaller competitors have to find novel ways to drive app usage.” However, Apple’s App Store or Google Play the only shop window, says Herbison. “The market is very fragmented with people downloading our apps from a variety of sources, including word of mouth, media recommendations and social media, to name but a few. It’s therefore important that we consider all channels as well as overall brand awareness in developing our marketing strategy for both mobile and desktop.”

It’s a point that the egaming industry is only too aware of, especially with access denied by Google Play. Likewise, much of what the travel industry is doing on mobile in terms of speed, simple navigation and innovative features is applicable to this sector, too. And egaming companies are reporting similar trends to the travel industry, chiefly that mobile is now overtaking the humble desktop and laptop PC as the main online channel.

The days of mobile being a niche revenue stream are long gone, as Hotels. com’s Craig asserts. You need to think about mobile at every step of the customer journey. “Your mobile device is a constant at your side: from thinking about where you want to go, selecting a hotel, to going on the trip itself.” In an egaming world where so much focus is currently placed simply on the bet itself, this could prove to be an invaluable lesson to learn.