Over the past few months, I’ve had the opportunity to talk with product managers at all the major travel industry mobile players.

Interestingly, their preference for distribution options ranges from “it doesn’t really matter” to “it really DOES matter”. Without naming names, there seems to be agreement on the advantages to both platforms:

Mobile websites:

• Updates are instantly available to the user (you can’t force updates with apps)
• Cross-platform functionality
• In-house developers can use existing skill sets
• Development time can be faster

Mobile phone apps:

• People don’t usually want to inccur data roaming charges when abroad
• Can be a higher level of functional reliability (no cross-browser issues)

For many hotels – especially independent properties – it’s a resource issue. A simple mobile website can be the most effective option.

Tip: If building an app isn’t a realistic option for you, consider OTAs to be a good partner for you on this.

Mobile marketing is going to be increasingly important for hotels in the months and years ahead, so this is something to plan now – if you haven’t done so already.

What is your mobile strategy?

[Photo credit: The Lightworks]

Google and Microsoft explain how consumers are interacting with mobile…and how suppliers can reach them.

Thomas O’Neil, Google Travel

Mobile landing pages: designing the user experience

• landing pages are evolving
• 4 great examples
  • Hotels.com/iPhone
    • being first moving has big advantage
    • have 1 million+ app downloads
  • m.toyota.com
  • m.cnn.com
  • iPhone.fandago.com
• key take-away: there needs to be optimized landing pages for the consumer
• not everyone has an smart phone…design for less
• search google webmasters: “mobile seo”
  • search algorithm is different for mobile sites

Mobile search: what consumers are doing

• not usually willing to do more than one search
• probably won’t go beyond top 2-3 search result listings
• they search for roughly the same amount of words…but search less often
• SEO is extremely important. If you’re not in the top 1-3 results, you may as well not even be there.

Advertising on the go: opportunities to reach individuals

• 4 types of Google advertising opportunities
  • WAP search
  • HTML search
  • content network (on other sites)
  • YouTube videos
• understand which apps your audience is using to choose advertising opportunities
• Google provides a high level of reporting options

Read more…