Photo credit: andreas_fishler on Flickr (Creative Commons).
“Hyper-growth”. This is how Mark Young, a vice president of NBCUniversal, owner of Fandango.com, describes mobile purchases. Expedia, EBay, and Fandango reported an increase of on-the-go purchases from smartphones and tablets, Bloomberg reports.
What’s interesting about this article is that ABI Research claims that mobile transactions only grew 7.6% last year, while mobile computing has risen dramatically. However, the percentage changes when focused categories including movie tickets and travel accommodations are concerned, which independent wireless analyst Chetan Sharma claims are “vaulting ahead”.
This ties in with data recently released by Google, which claims that 40% of mobile guests booked a room from hotel websites found using mobile search engines–a number that, while impressive, is still hindered by the poor user experience of many hotel websites.
Bloomburg reports that because of this increase in mobile purchases, hospitality movers and shakers are optimizing their web properties for mobile devices and tablets, including hotwire.com, which will soon release a tablet-optimized version of their OTA.
The evidence is mounting and now impossible to ignore. All hotels need to optimized their online marketing for mobile devices and tablets, if they want to stay in the game. The very near future will be a world where mobile is first, and the tradition web is last.
About Brandon Dennis
Brandon is the Technical Marketing Manager at buuteeq, the digital marketing system for hotels. He manages buuteeq’s SEO, paid media channels, content creation, and the company blog. You can connect with him on Twitter @buuteeq.
