“On and shortly after April 21, 2015, a lot of people in e-commerce and SEO at travel companies are going to get fired."
This is how Susan Black, Co-Founder of Black & Wright, got the attention of the audience at New York TravelFest Travel 2.0.
NB: This is an analysis by Larry Smith, a partner at US-based Thematix.
It was great to see about 100 people immediately get on their smart phones and check their own websites at the Google Mobile-Friendly website.
There was a collective sigh of relief from most of the bloggers since they publish to Wordpress and other managed blogs that are mobile compliant.
This means their SEO rankings will at least remain the same, and maybe move up as some top performers disappear. It’s those really big companies that missed the beat that will disappear from the first page and will suffer severe consequences.
Despite this rare transparency, backed up by the stern warnings Google published about these rankings changes for several months, many companies just did not believe that “the year of mobile” is here and now.
Black suggested:
"Responsive and adaptive mobile design is nice, but the real winners will be the companies that go deep and rethink exactly how their customers can book and buy on the spot."
For example, the award-winning app from Kayak understands and rewards the differences between a mobile app and its users vs. the desktop; then delivers a unique interaction exactly appropriate to the common customer need.
These concepts of knowing your customer needs “in-channel” and your product benefits are not so easy, but might be richly rewarded.
For example, an audience of Seniors 60+ with time and money might greatly prefer the voice interface a la SIRI, Google NOW, and Microsoft Cortana, to search, book, and buy.
Regardless, attention to certain colors, font sizes, and images to text considerations are critical.
With simple profiling and account preferences, the grandparents can visit the children or their faraway friends with a simple voice command.
Others can call in a dinner reservation from the airplane or hotel, and execute via OpenTable and Uber to work in concert upon arrival, delays and all.
Big takeaway: you shop different in-store vs. catalog vs. desktop web vs. phone because they relate to you differently; know it, reward it, but don’t conform it.
Bigger takeaway is that mobile is the voice gateway into buying travel faster and easier. And more often.
Hang-on, move forward, this is going to be a big trip. Call home.
NB: This is an analysis by Larry Smith, a partner at US-based Thematix.
NB2: Mobile image via Shutterstock,