Behold the bounty to be had in travel when data roaming charges ease

NB: This is a viewpoint by Jay Ganaden, vice president of digital strategy at Momentum Design Lab.

It’s the mid-1990s, and I’m one of those management consultants so lovingly praised on the hit TV drama House of Lies.

I traveled for about 90% of the time and needed an easier way to communicate other than a pager and pay phone.

In 1984, AT&T was broken up into several different "Baby Bells". These became mobile network operators and travelling between them became highly expensive due to the lack of roaming agreements or consolidation.

It was not until the re-consolidation of the Baby Bells beginning in the mid-90s, and the expansion of providers such as Cingular (Now AT&T Mobility), Sprint PCS (Now Sprint Nextel), Verizon, and VoiceStream Wireless PCS (now T-Mobile USA) that roaming charges would be alleviated, and largely forgotten.

Roaming in Europe

The subsequent frontier for the mobile network operators has been data on smartphones and, in Europe, it’s quite frankly extortionate as the same companies operate throughout most of the EU. Adoption of mobile applications while roaming has struggled as a result.

Nevertheless, history is set to repeat itself.

At least, such was the buzz at Mobile World Congress this year. Thanks to EU Roaming Regulations, the cost of roaming charges is about to come down to more reasonable levels. The regulations went into effect as of July 2012, instituting rate caps on voice and data plans.

Each July, through 2014, the caps will drop even lower.

Wholesale regulation

Consumers stand to benefit quite a bit, but also included are regulations for wholesale rates.

This means that Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs), such as Virgin Mobile, would be able to "lease" bandwidth at reduced rates, enabling them to be truly competitive.

I could also see data-only operators, such as US-based 4G provider Clear, building a European presence (note, Sprint Nextel has a slight majority 50.8% ownership of Clear).

What do these have in common?

Consumer regulation

In July 2014, consumers will have the right to choose different carriers to fulfill their roaming requirements. Feasibly, one could have voice coverage via O2 and data coverage via Vodafone.

For Europe-based consumers, the added freedom to isolate and choose data plans that suit their needs will be a huge benefit, especially for consumers who travel between countries. Competition on data plan pricing will be interesting.

We will see the carriers looking to retain their voice customers and poach customers of other carriers with attractive data plans, with perhaps a net benefit of pricing equilibrium on flat-rate pricing plans.

Travel industry benefits

In the travel industry, the net effect of these regulations means great things.

With the proliferation of low cost air carriers throughout Europe, like EasyJet or AirBerlin, it is easy and inexpensive to fly places; and with reduced roaming rates, it will become easier and less expensive for people to stay in touch and plan their holidays right from their phones or tablets.

On the enterprise side, we’ll see the big travel companies increasing their production quality on their own branded mobile applications.

We already have EasyJet’s app ecosystem (see below), but we’ll see more investments in mobile since the user won’t necessarily drop off when leaving their home market.

Similarly, marketing budgets will also likely increase, as the big travel brands work to drive user acquisition on their own products or generate brand awareness while a customer is traveling.

From feature phones to smartphones, reduced roaming rates will benefit all starting even with OEM functions. SMS on feature phones would allow families and friends to text when they’ve arrived at the airport or the hotel.

Smartphones with maps would help consumers locate their destinations. Yes, these are things we take for granted and getting these effectively bricked while one is traveling is all the more frustrating.

With smartphone and tablet usage on the rise, there is no question that more travel applications will gain traction in line with the regulations.

Whether you are a last-minute traveler or a structured one, there will be great opportunities for booking and trip planning applications for on-the-go travelers.

These new in-destination applications can be provided by travel brands trying to re-capture and retain the attention and engagement of the customers they usually lose after their web-based booking process.

Backpacking over the summer, but don’t have a plan?

Plan your stops, book your train tickets, and get a last minute deal on a hotel for the night while you’re on the road.

Snowboarding the Alps?

Rent your 4WD vehicle, figure out weather and road closures, lift ticket prices, or your next heli-boarding adventure as you hop between Courchevel and Tyrol.

Inexpensive data roaming will enable these travelers and clearly benefit any OTA, tour operator, hotelier and any other businesses driven by bookings.

Location-based services

Applications with location-based services will become ever more valuable to travelers, and startups that have survived "LBS 1.0" in the US will no doubt expand in Europe.

Consider the 2013 Mobile World Congress Best Overall App winner, Waze. On first glance, it appears as a GPS navigation system, but the community components help consumers estimate drive times and share fuel prices. Such applications, including our own Bynd Road and Rail Trip Planner, will be valuable to anyone choosing to travel by car or rail.

Consider still another LBS app, aged by today’s social and mobile standards, but whose user adoption cannot be ignored: Foursquare.

The game of check-ins has most certainly been played out in America, but the true value of Foursquare has been around yet another community that fills the service daily with unsolicited tips, to-do’s and believable photography.

Applications that provide community-based advice are set to become even more valuable in Europe.

Perhaps the most utilitarian of travel applications are location-based "nearby" or rate/review services. When traveling to some place new, mobile users often turn to services like Yelp or TripAdvisor to get an idea of what restaurants, bars and/or shopping might be around.

Now you might be thinking: Foursquare, Facebook, Yelp, Google Places, TripAdvisor-- really? I mention these applications because we take these for granted.

That is the bar that is set today. But I’m imagining that newer, smarter services that help reduce the noise or tighten the conversation will have a blank slate to grow in Europe.

Examples include Desti for natural language travel search, Airport Chatter for airport information and City Notes for a shortlist of recommendations from a "connected friend".

Also of great importance is the marketing plan that will accompany these fledgling services. Even large travel brands, with renewed freedom to experiment with new mobile strategies, will be on task to market the new products to their customer base.

We’re not only talking standards of discovery and user adoption tactics; effective mobile marketers must use quantitative mobile analytics platforms like Flurry and qualitative user experience research to help understand what is successful and build upon that data in their products.

Social as a platform for discovery

Social will also be a big factor in the European expansion of mobile. Marketers will be resourceful, using social channels to converse with customers, monitor customer sentiment and encourage the social interactions inherent in mobile.

Again, the tools are out there, from community platforms like our own Bynd or Lithium, to social analytics platforms like Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Facebook, a social "operating system" in it’s own right, will be both an attractive advertising platform for the new European mobile products, and a platform for understanding customers.

Clever marketers will integrate their mobile products with Facebook’s Open Graph to allow their applications to share where their customers have been, wish lists of places they want to go, and photos of their journeys.

Established travel brands like TripAdvisor, and newer ones like Wanderfly (recently bought by TripAdvisor), are using Facebook to drive awareness and adoption of their mobile apps.

To be successful, travel brands must drive their users to not only adopt and use the new mobile products, but also encourage them to share their activities on the social networks at large.

Moreover, in a Google AdWords world, this same exposure using social networks is quite cost-effective by comparison.

Facebook is just one social channel that may be used to encourage social activity and drive discovery. Foursquare, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and Path are all "incumbent" social networks with large user bases that may be leveraged to give new and emerging mobile products maximum exposure.

Sharing, cross-posting activities and inviting fellow travelers to participate within your own mobile experiences, as well as on this ecosystem as a whole, will be essential to the success of the new crop of European mobile applications.

To that end, its going to be critical for businesses to keep an updated profile on these networks so that users can proactively leave feedback via check-in mechanisms and post-visit so that future visitors to the app or website will be able to more easily discover the location.

We have yet to see the cards fall with the collision of social and place data on Facebook Open Graph Search, but it is safe to say that the data will be insightful and predictive enough for travel brands to derive travel recommendations (and in turn sell against them).

This will in turn drive more relevant advertising or sharing of meaningful travel tips and content straight to the mobile device.

Finally, let’s not forget about Google and its potential travel plays taking hold in Europe. The clear (though perhaps cost-prohibitive) frontier that could take off and leapfrog mobile travel experiences as we know them today is in Google Glass. Google Glass is a new example of the "internet of things", merging product and application experience design.

This eyewear technology will have all the search and alert capability of a smartphone, providing instant location-relevant info about a new destination.

Coupled with the language translation use case pictured below, the technology certainly holds a lot of promise for quickly finding one’s way in unfamiliar places for travelers in Europe (or anywhere else in the world for that matter).