Travel brands who are pondering their mobile strategy and wondering "what do my customers want from mobile when they're travelling?" would be well advised to take a look at Norm Rose's recent posting - Travel Technology: Top Apple Travel Downloads
Norm looks at the top 5 paid and free iPhone downloads in the travel category. The top paid app is a flight tracker. Services recommending local restaurants take up 2 of the top 5 paid and 2 of the top 5 free slots.
This insight coupled with popularity of itinerary aggregation applications like TripIt suggests their is a real appetite amongst travellers for useful mobile services whether delivered as applications (downloads), over the mobile-web, or by text messaging.
The learning for travel brands is that travellers want mobile to:
- Keep them in control (e.g. flight alerts)
- Provide advice in unfamiliar situations (e.g. restaurant recommendations)
- Save them time (e.g.centralised, electronic itinerary)
Norm laments the absence of major travel brands from the mobile app stores - I'd go further and suggest that very few travel brands have a coherent mobile strategy of any sort - leaving their customers go out and source their own mobile services. What a missed opportunity.
Yet, there is still a big role for travel brands in the mobile space, particuarly those brands who collect booking data. Many of the mobile applications travellers are downloading today are stove pipe applications that do only one thing. Yet, travellers have many different information needs at different stages of their journey, so do they really want to download multiple appliactions for flight alerts, restaurant reccomendations, itinerary reminders, weather forecasts, travel guides, airport guides, etc, etc? This leads to what Yahoo! are terming 'App Fatigue' and is why they've adopted an aggregation strategy witht their mobile services.
Aggregation is an opportunity for travel brands too. They should provide mobile services that support and reflect the changing needs of travellers throughout their journey. This way they'll enhance customer service and create new direct and indirect anciallary sales opportunities.
And, to really maximise take-up of mobile services, travel brands should consider that different people have different needs depending on why they're travelling, where they're travelling to, and how long they'll be away. The end goal should be to tailor mobile services at each stage of the journey to the needs of key customer segments.
The good news for travel brands is they can easily exploit their booking data to deliver these types of mobile service, with minimal impact on their existing systems. For example, our StreamThru platform takes a booking data feed and then uses a simple rules-based model to configure what mobile content gets served to travellers at each stage of their trip, depending on their profile. The result is a relevant, personalised mobile dialogue that travellers return to time and again throughout their trip.
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