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Travelmole e-Wire Q&A with Mike Atherton, managing director of Mantic Point
Tuesday, 30 Jan, 2009
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Q: What is Mantic Point and what does it offer the industry?
A: Mantic Point operates a white-label service, providing up-to-date travel information to holidaymakers and business travellers through their mobile phone. The service helps travel companies keep in touch with their customers while they are on the move, providing up-to-the-minute, personalised travel information, which is delivered direct to the customer’s mobile phone using proven SMS technology.
Mantic Point’s software, StreamThru, lets travel brands update their customers automatically with timely, personalised information about their trip, including flight information, snow reports, weather forecasts, traffic updates, itinerary reminders, destination information and even quizzes to help pass the time. By using StreamThru, travel brands can enhance their customer service and boost ancillary revenue streams. As a white-label service, StreamThru enables travel brands to engage with travellers who are on the move, with no delay in getting the services that people want to market. Existing clients include easyJet, BAA and WAYN.com.
Q: Do you see the credit crunch affecting your business? How? And if not, why not?
A: We see the future as positive, yet challenging. Businesses that can add something new or incremental to existing revenue streams will prosper. We provide an outsourced model offering new services and innovation to travel brands. Our business format means that travel brands need not invest in in-house IT resource to support their mobile projects and with a variety of payment structures available, including ad-funded, it can cost companies very little or nothing to implement.
Q: With the recession now in full swing, do you think there will be a slow down on IT spend in the travel sector generally?
A: Yes, definitely. Only projects with very short breakeven or those that contribute to a company’s revenue stream from day one will remain a possibility.
IT departments will shrink the number of initiatives they implement focusing on core business processes which reduce costs and maintain revenues.
Q: Will 2009 be the year people start booking travel on their phones? If not why not?
A: Mobile search and book will remain a niche application in 2009. If people have access to a traditional PC based web-browser, why wouldn’t they use that in favour of mobile? Data entry is much easier, screen space is more viewable and network speeds are generally much faster.
People tend to use mobile when they are on the move and they don’t have access to a regular desktop browser, which means the types of task they are trying to accomplish are very different. For booking, the needs are much more likely to be ‘I need to get on an earlier flight’ or ‘My plans have changed, I need a hotel room tonight.’ Mobile can help in an emergency situation – but these are marginal cases.
Q: What is the traveller looking for from their mobile?
A: Relevance, relevance and relevance. I’m mobile, by definition. I have things on my mind, tasks to accomplish. I need information and services that help me get done what needs to be done where I am and now. A one size fits all approach will not help, but hinder me. My mobile service needs to understand the time I have, where I am and why I’m there – pulling all this together to feed me the content I need to assist me.
To provide these personalised, highly relevant and timely mobile dialogues, travel providers need to create services that are location-based, time-sensitive and context-aware. This is achieved by exploiting the knowledge they have of the traveller’s itinerary, which is captured within the booking data. Exploiting booking data is the key to delivering a meaningful mobile service that customers truly value and will as a result, open up new untapped revenue streams.
Q: How do you think the onset of the semantic web will affect web use on mobile phones?
A: In a travel setting, where a person has a clear focus (e.g. I’m catching my flight, it’s my last day in my destination) we understand the context in which they’re operating and can predict the type of information that will be relevant to them at that specific time.
A semantic web should make it easier to aggregate and filter the information that is most relevant at a certain stage of a traveller’s trip and allow us to display this information in an intuitive form.
Although we are a long way from Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of a semantic web, applications like Google Maps for mobile, where search results can be overlaid onto a map, are an indication of where things are going. In an environment where the user has limited screen size, seeing the results of a search (where location is relevant) on a map, helps the user quickly hone in on the most relevant results.
Usability is critical to getting more people using the mobile-web and I think we’ll see many more ‘friendly’ interfaces- like Google Maps – start to emerge over the coming months.
by Dinah Hatch
Dinah
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