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Mobile booking still foxes industry, Travelmole debate hears
Sunday, 19 May, 2010
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The travel industry has yet to transform the mobile phone into a booking tool, with many still unclear how to monetise the platform according to a debate sponsored by DataArt and moderated by TravelMole.
As the great and the good of the travel technology industry gathered to debate the mobile revolution at the central London seminar chaired by TravelMole’s own Graham McKenzie, it became clear that there were still many bars to booking travel via smart phone and confusion about how to make it work.
Panellist and CEO of digital media company Steely Eye Tony Grubb told the audience: “Mobiles are not going to go away. They are not a fad. These devices have as much computing power as the Apollo space craft. But we have to make sure what we are doing with mobiles is relevant to the market because relevance equals sustainability.”
Fellow panellist Amadeus UK managing director Tim Russell said that there was still a fuzziness about the business model when it came to customers booking travel on their phones.
He explained: “My great concern is that a lot of the information comes from people like us. Ultimately with the new smart phones they are accessing information in live time and hitting our systems when right now there is no clear commercial model. Normally we get our money from airlines and hotels but now that people are accessing the information willy nilly what happens? Someone has to pay for that.”
Cartrawler CTO Bobby Healy, also on the panel, said the most obvious problem with getting people to book on a mobile was that most of the time there was simply no need.
He said: “In travel, the average advance purchase time for a flight is 44 days. With a hotel it’s 30 and with a car it’s 19 days. You don’t need a mobile to book it because you’ve clearly got enough time to get to a PC to make your booking. Our strategy with mobiles is to interact with customers on them when the PC is out of play, when people are on planes or arriving in an airport. We’re not displacing normal PC booking.”
He added: “You have to ask. With mobiles, are we just itching a scratch here, is it a PR thing? With us, it’s a lab project and I won’t be buying a Lear Jet in anticipation of the profits I’ll be making from it.”
However, emerging markets like India and China where internet booking patterns have yet to become entrenched tell a very different story.
Soren Langelund, co-founder of cruise website Ewaterways, told the panel: “Uptake on mobile booking is slow here but it isn’t in places like Japan and China. It’s about time and adaptation. Offer the service and people will eventually get used to it and make bookings with it like they do there.”
Tony Grubb added: “Look at the online world in the UK some years ago. There was a real reluctance to make online purchases in comparison to the US, Japan and the Far East. But it’s a cultural thing and every day it changes. Now people are happy to book online. The same will happen with mobile.”
He said mobile booking would also grow as the UK’s younger demographic did. He said: “Kids are using mobiles at a very early age and the moment they hit 18, or even earlier, they are going to be buying stuff on them. They are not afraid of the technology. With people over 45, however, the numbers who buy things on their phone drops off dramatically.”
Matt Cheevers, former Teletext boss and managing director of web strategy consultancy Smooth Direction, said some of the slow progress of mobile booking uptake lay with the UK travel industry itself.
He said: “If the travel industry does not understand something and how it will fit in, then it ignores it. We did it with the online space and now we are doing it with mobile.”
One audience member cut through the technology soul searching, stating that the simple reason that people did not book via their mobiles was that they simply didn’t know how to, with poor instructions and complex, unintuitive processes.
Meanwhile, Amadeus’ Russell raised a flag for the travel trade.
He explained: “Mobiles are just not that easy to book with. It’s much simpler to talk to a travel agent.”
By Dinah Hatch
TIQT was sponsored and facilitated by DataArt – www.DataArt.com
Dinah
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