It is often a press release on a company activity that brings me to think about a market trend. In this case a press release from Australian owned hotel chain Rydges turned by thoughts towards mobile. In this release Rydges announced the launch of a WAP site for booking and searching at m.rydges.com.Mobile has been a constant form of chatter and speculation since 2000. I was in the UK at the time and BT must have spent millions of pounds telling British consumers about how WAP would change their lives. They invested even more in launching new brands such as Genie (now defunkt and part of O2) to promote WAP and mobile services. Not to be left out of the "dotmobile" boom, Vodafone and Vivendi launched Vizzavi with an offline marketing campaign that would make even Pets.com's poor old shareholders shake their heads with despair (Vivendi eventually sold out to Vodafone). Lastminute.com rushed out a mobile booking and voice activated services - again with no result.
There was a sense of panic in the air - if you don't get into mobile the whole business will collapse. Now remember this was 2000 - mobile penetration was less than half what it is now and there was not even a hint of standards or platforms/operating system stability in mobile. Lots of money - near zero results.
Every year since we have had another round of buzz around mobile. PDAs hit the market, Blackberries spread like weeds, Nokia dropped the word "phone" form internal memos and language in favour of the word "device", Windows Mobile finally because somewhat usable and the iPhone became the number one product launch in living memory (in terms of buzz vs sales). At each stage mobile was hot again. Thankfully now the response is a little more measured. Now we know we have to develop mobile plans and products but it is not a panic.
Response to this buzz has to be managed because it is really difficult to build a mobile product. With a website there is a lot of platform standardisation a company can relay on. So long as you code your site to be viewed by IE and Firefox (and maybe Safari) then you enough of the market covered. However with mobile there is no platform standards. Palm, Blackberry, Nokia, Apple, Windows all have different ways to displaying/accessing web pages. In the case of WAP almost every second device requires a different layout mechanism. There is also the debate about whether or not you take a browser or downloaded application approach.
This brings us back to the Rydges announcement. They have gone for a non- application based WAP approach. The hook for consumers is that bookings through the site qualify for a priority rate (worth 10% off BAR). According to their eCommerce Manager Stefan Drury by 2010 they are aiming to do "at least the same number of room nights through mobile as the primary www.rydges.com website". I like the intention but think the real work should be done outside of WAP and targeted at the browser/application approach.
I am going to treat this post as an intro/part 1 post. In later posts I will take a look at some of the online mobile companies that have come across my radar taking different approaches to mobile booking on travel. What do you think about mobile. Is now the right time to panic and build and launch as much mobile as you can?
thanks to Gaetan Lee on Flickr for the photo
7 comments:
I'll be looking forward to this series. It's one of those thoughts that continuously pops into my mind too. A development you feel you *should* tackle, but one that you're not sure warrants tackling...
I think there is a reasonable amount to be had from the mobile space, so long as other common infrastructure is in place.
As an example, to be successful in the mobile space - at this point in time I think a tourism provider would need to provide access to the mobile interface through a variety of mediums such as web and application. On the application front, it might even warrant a product of palm, windows mobile and iphone.
That would be a whole lot of work if you don't have common infrastructure available to underpin it all, such as a web service interface to your business.
Once that part of the problem has been resolved, the next issue will be providing compelling reasons for a consumer to utilise that service (priority rates seems like a reasonable idea at face value) - which might mean that more focus will need to be placed on CRM software to tailor the delivery.
Lots of things to consider, can't wait to see what your thoughts are on the matter as well Tim.
Continental Airlines put their mobile address on every ticket jacket and now has over 10,000 unique visitors a day for flight status alone.
We chose to go with browser support first for TripChill (www.tripchill.com) because we can support more devices out of the gate. I think that we'll methodically add specific device applications when they make sense. For example we can add location based services and better calendar integration with a device specific application since we can access device resources.
-Alex
I think its about partnering with the right channels. Where are the top mobile dollars being generated from currently?
Mobile positioning and GPS are becoming popular. The IPhone platform has forced the other big players into action, so we'll see increasingly 'cool' mobile apps and devices across the board.
I like the concept of mobile services being paid for via the mobile phone bill, because that increases convenience and seems less fraudulent. So a mobile number is exchanged rather than a credit card number.
The embracing of these technologies empower customers to make decisions on the road, fostering impulsive behavior making prior planning less important.
Lets get ready to enter the brave new world of 'bite sized' travel services.
@Pavan - great to have you on blog! Welcome - agree GPS is the key the mobile services. People interacting with travel services through the phone are going to insist that the phone knows where they are.
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