We queued up for the Black Friday bargains, jumped online for the Cyber Monday mania and dug deep for Giving Tuesday.
As the holiday season kicks off in earnest and as the dust settles on these orgiastic days of consumerism and charity, it’s worth giving a thought to the rise of mobile commerce (m-commerce) and its importance to the 21st century economy.
NB: This is a viewpoint by Richard Pemberton, ICT director - Best Western Hotels GB and advisory board member, Hospitality Technology Europe.
For any hotelier that has yet to develop a comprehensive mobile strategy, the statistics on mobile commerce make for sobering reading.
According to data from IMRG and Capgemini, m-commerce sales have doubled in the space of a year and now account for almost a quarter of total online sales, up from 11.6 per cent in the same period.
Lending weight to the importance of m-commerce a Google report revealed that an astounding 17.4 per cent of global web traffic now comes through web users’ mobile devices.
In my last post, I talked about the rise of the mobile wallet. These recent findings again highlight how critical it is for hoteliers to have a well thought out mobile strategy to capture some of this fast growing revenue stream.
For the proactive hotelier the opportunities are endless but those that don’t pounce on it are destined to be left in the dust by their more savvy competitors.
Indeed a separate survey conducted by Econsultancy found that half of all smartphone owners (51 per cent) hadn’t made a purchase using their smartphone in the last six months.
The news for hoteliers?
There is still huge potential for m-commerce sales to continue rising as a proportion of total online sales.
Despite the growing evidence that the smartphone reigns supreme, many general managers still find themselves struggling to develop effective, user-friendly mobile travel sites and apps.
For hoteliers, making sure your website is mobile enabled, accessible and user-friendly across all platforms is the critical first step. Once this has been undertaken, general managers can then begin to look at the infinite amount of ways to improve the hotel experience and potentially increase their revenue in the process.
Integrating something like your business traveller or tiered guest rewards programme with your mobile platforms so that members don't have to carry their cards with them is just one example.
Opportunities like these are only going to increase as smartphones become more sophisticated and powerful, allowing for new ways of doing business. In the future, predictive technology will be able to intelligently link users smartphone apps together, perhaps suggesting a Best Western hotel room following a British Airways booking.
(Yet) Another way forward
Looking into a crystal ball it’s easy to see how these predictive technologies can provide immeasurable benefits to both guest and hotelier within the physical hotel as well.
Smart networks might send you an NFC (Near Field Communication) code to use your phone as a room key or ply you with vouchers to redeem in the in-house restaurant or bar.
Of course it’s worth remembering and re-emphasising that these revenue streams can only come to fruition once a mobile strategy has been put into place; something that takes a lot of hard work, time and investment – three things that not every hotelier has a ready supply of.
There is also the "lost opportunity" cost which needs to be assessed if m-commerce is not embraced. Some hotels which have embraced mobile are seeing a high percentage of same day bookings from mobile devices and there is a great deal of potential to sell empty rooms to same day bookers on m-commerce platforms.
NB: This is a viewpoint by Richard Pemberton, ICT director - Best Western Hotels GB and advisory board member, Hospitality Technology Europe.
NB2:Mobile book now image via Shutterstock.