Mobile is hot. Now that’s nothing new, especially if you’ve been reading the pages of Tnooz or any other tech news outlets.
So hot, in fact, that mobile was part of just about every other Prediction 2011 from the Tnooz team, including mine.
But as hot as it is as a general technology trend, mobile is perhaps more relevant to the travel industry than to other segments. Why is that?
Travel is an activity that takes you somewhere else – somewhere that is not your home or your office, where you don’t have your computer, where you may not even have access to a wifi or wired internet connection.
That somewhere is often an unfamiliar place where you need access to information about your itinerary or your locale, a place where you still want to be able to communicate with your social or business circle. That somewhere requires a mobile device.
Mobile devices can, are, and will be used in all elements of the traveler lifecycle to varying degrees. In some phases they will be the leading channel by which you can interact with travelers; in others, they will play a secondary role. Either way, the importance of mobile devices makes it imperative to have a plan for how to successfully implement a mobile strategy.
Ness Software Product Labs has created a five-step program for developing and implementing your own successful mobile strategy. You can download the entire white paper, but I will provide a summary of our approach.
Step 1: Determine Use Cases
While mobile is a critical channel, simply creating a mobile app or website is not a strategy. You may have some objectives in mind for your mobile strategy, but if you don’t know what specifically your target customer wants to do with their mobile device in different use scenarios – and how that maps to your objectives – you’re unlikely to deliver the right solution.
It’s often tempting to rush to an answer or use a canned solution, but expediency is often the enemy of quality.
Furthermore, overlay your customers’ desires with your priorities and build them into your user experience.
Please, please, please pay attention to the user experience that you deliver to your customers. Too many companies shoot themselves in the foot through poor user experience design, burying the most important/common activities under multiple tiers of UI or letting endless layers of complexity turn a 30-second process into a three-minute affair.
Start your use case development by considering the following points, amongst others:
- Understand what role mobile plays within the traveler lifecycle, and how it supports and extends other channels. This means asking the questions: “When will they use it?” or “What is the context of the activity they will try to complete on the device?”
- How are you creating value for your customer? Saving time? Money? Enhancing the experience of their stay or use of your product and/or services?
- What are the gaps in current communication and interaction channels? Sometimes it’s as simple as alerts for flight delays, reminders for a spa appointment or letting them know about activities or special events.
- What changes in behavior do you want to achieve? Are you trying to influence buying behavior (up-sell/cross-sell), or reduce operational costs via self-service or process automation?
- Are you dealing with complex or spur-of-the-moment decisions?
And one important point to keep in mind during the entire design process is not to lose sight of your brand. It’s very important to ensure that you provide a consistent representation of your brand over every channel, including mobile.
If you have an upscale brand with a utilitarian mobile app, the psychological dissonance may negatively impact usage and conversion rates.
In Parts Two and Three, I’ll cover the rest of the process to a successful mobile strategy.
Whatever else may follow, one of THE key issues for mobile and travellers is the cost of data when roaming! A strategy that seems fine within one large geographic market like the USA could fall flat on its face in, say, Europe, where no matter how useful and well designed the application, the data costs when not in your home country could kill it stone dead.
So, I suggest the key question is “can mobile apps for travel thrive in an international traveller environment?” It’s possible that it could work for those corporate travellers who can piggy back on their employer-provided data roaming facility (assuming they have that!) and for whom their corporate IT have not locked down the device so they cannot install the app. But is that a viable market? But for the typical cash sensitive private traveller? I think not!
I agree that data costs, particularly for international travel can get quite high and could be an inhibitor to use abroad. But as you do point out that it’s likely a less of an issue for business travelers who, even if they don’t have a corporate data roaming plan (I don’t) can expense the costs. Personally, I have CDMA service in the US, so when I travel internationally, I have multiple SIMs for each “home” market, so that mitigates the roaming costs for me.
But the strategies you pursue are unique to each situation. It comes back to understanding your target customer and determining whether or not the use case fits.
If your core target customer is very cost sensitive, travels heavily internationally and you don’t expect they will use the mobile web often, then your decision on how extensively to pursue a mobile strategy may differ with other firms. But is the example you give an outlier? If your target customer does occasional international travel, but 98% of their travel is domestic, then it’s much less of an issue.
Hi guys, a little late to the party, but wanted to let you know here in Singapore, for the Singapore Tourism Board’s yoursingapore guide for mobile, we worked very closely with the telco Starhub to leverage their tourist prepaid card to allow free usage of the app. We’re working with them to develop a solution for roaming, when they select Starhub as their carrier upon arrival, the customer will be allowed to hopefully download and use the app for free. Other web services will be charged as normal though. But essentially, it’s tough going and a tough negotiation, but we’re beginning to see some progress as the telco’s start to open up.
Thanks, keep up the great discussions.