Why are airlines, travel agents, and tour operators best placed to deliver mobile services to travellers?

Airlines, travel agents, and tour operators have a huge advantage when it comes to providing a mobile experience for travellers.

And, I'm not talking about exposing a version of your booking engine through a mobile web-site ... I'm just not convinced there is a mass market for booking travel via your mobile phone (changing your booking and mobile check-in, I get ... but, not the initial booking).

The mobile travel experience ...

When people are travelling they tend to want specific information based on where they are and what they're doing at the time ...

• So, if I'm travelling to the airport, tell me if my flights on time, let me know how long I'll have to queue in security, and warn me of any traffic delays that could hamper my journey
• When I'm at the airport: if I'm bored,offer me some mobile games; if I like shopping, tell me where the best deals are in the airport stores. And, notify me when it's time to board.
• When I arrive at my destination, show me my car hire and hotel reservation details, so I don't have to worry about carrying bits of paper around with me.
• And, while I'm away: tell me what the weather will be like tomorrow, suggest a good restaurant, help me plan a family day out, tell me what's on at the theatre, and if I have a problem show me my travel insurance details and provide me with some emergency contact numbers.

Tap into impulse ...

Get this right and you'll deliver a service that your customer's truly value and that gives you a short term competitive advantage. And, by satisfying your customer's impulse wants and needs (e.g. restaurants, days out, entertainment) you'll tap into a new and lucrative ancillary revenue stream.

Itinerary gives location and context = relevant content

But, to deliver this type of mobile assistance, you need to understand the traveller's itinerary so you can adapt their experience based on knowledge of the person's current location and context.

This is where first generation mobile-web travel services fall down. Their lack of knowledge about the traveller and her itinerary places a heavy burden on the user to re-key data about their trip every time they want to access a service (e.g. flight information, weather). When navigating to information, no matter how useful, is time-consuming and painful, this doesn't make for a great user experience.

So, returning to my opening statement ... airlines, travel agents, and tour operators ... the guardians of booking data - have a huge advantage because they capture the itinerary information that forms the foundation of a compelling mobile travel experience. And, by providing mobile services that their customers truly value, they will create themselves new ancillary sales opportunities.

Travel companies can improve customer loyalty with mobile search

The mobile-web offers a fabulous opportunity for forward thinking travel companies to build customer loyalty. Travel companies are well positioned to exploit their booking and itinerary data to create a valuable local-search facility for their customers ...which also reinforces the travel company's brand throughout the trip.

It's getting cheaper to use the mobile web from abroad

Until now it's been so expensive to access the mobile web from abroad that it's been pointless for travel companies to invest in creating a mobile web-experience for their customers. But under pressure from EU Telco commissioner Vivianne Reding, most recently at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, operators have been told to reduce their data roaming charges significantly by July 2008 or face regulation. Sensing the way the wind is blowing, many operators have bowed to the inevitable and have already started to reduce their prices.

This is great news for travel companies, because there are a whole host of ways they can enhance their customer's travel experience using mobile services .. and a simple place to start is by offering customers a location-aware mobile search facility.

Without location, mobile search is hit and miss

Unlike with traditional web-search, on the mobile web, searchers are usually looking for something very specific so understanding the location and context of the person conducting the search are prerequisite to delivering quality results.

And, lets face it mobile search today offers a pretty poor user experience.

For example, I recently typed 'cinema' into Google's mobile search and the first result was a listing of movie times for a cinema in Singapore ... wonderful, apart from I was in the UK. The answer was to use Google's local search mode and enter my location manually, but let's face it life's too short ...

Location is hot ...

Everyone wants to improve the quality of search results and deliver better targeted ads to mobile users, so, it's not surprising that there's lots of noise around location based services at the moment - where the user doesn't have to manually input their location into their handset.

Google are very excited about the potential of mobile advertising. And, it's no surprise that their Android project includes GPS location technology in its specification.

Note: Network operators can already locate a phone to a cell level, which is accurate enough for most search applications. And, with the users permission a search provider can access this information, but as usual mobile operators made this service so expensive that very few service providers use it.

... but context is critical too

However, location on it's own is not enough. A relevant search also requires as much context a possible. For example, a location based service may know I'm at the airport, but why am I there? Am I meeting someone? Am I flying? And, if I'm flying, where to, when and for how long will I be away?

Travel companies already know location and context

Travel companies already have a huge advantage in this area. They know people's travel plans and timings ... which creates some great location and context data to feed into a mobile search.

And, travel companies have a relationship with their customers, so it's easy for them to get the customer's permission to use their personal information (location and context) to deliver better search results.

With all these advantages, their is a fantastic opportunity for travel companies to work with white-label search providers (e.g Medio , JumpTap) to deliver a great mobile search experience for their customers.

However, mobile search is only one way in which travel companies can use mobile services to enhance their customers' travel experience. In my next posting, I'll look at the bigger picture of using mobile to deliver relevant, contextual information to travellers while they're on the move.