At some point or other, most of us will have heard that mobile is just another channel. Yet many now see it as much more than that.
From a Facebook point of view, it has become more of a human behaviour or so head of travel Lee McCabe would have you think when considering a mobile strategy.
"It's not a technology. It is everything", McCabe told an audience during a WTM Travel Perspective session last week, and businesses and advertisers can't keep up with the pace with which mobile is moving.
Hence why only 11% of budgets are devoted to it perhaps - a "gap that has to close," says McCabe.
Little comfort then to all those nameless travel companies lumped into stats about the industry's lag when it comes to mobile. But, he did share thoughts on the three pillars a mobile app strategy should be built around - connection, context and convenience.
The first doesn't need much explaining - the companies that manage to connect people effectively across all devices will be the "winners."
For context think personalisation and the power of data in terms of enabling companies to predict what consumers want and target specific groups.
As a result of all this data, in the future search engines and online travel agencies will be able to serve up just one hotel to a consumer.
"As the potential of big data is realised and companies really understand their consumers, they should be able to predict with a high degree of confidence what my hotel should be.
"This is a long term thing and a big challenge for Facebook as well. The trick is separating the signal from the noise and exploiting the data."
Interesting to note that startups such as Top10 (Startup pitch here) are drawing on numerous data points to refine search for hotel shoppers.
The third pillar, convenience, is where in McCabe's view most companies fail. The travel industry needs to think about simplicity and making sure the path the purchase is as easy as possible.
This drive for simplicity will result in the demise of multi-purpose apps and "unbundling" to single purpose services such as HotelTonight and Uber which enable you to complete a transaction with "three clicks and a swipe."
Anyway, like it or not, it's happening around us and McCabe points to several trends that are currently shaping travel (on top of the rapid pace of change of mobile) to prove it:
- the 'Uberification' of everything - a revolution in the service industry which is being led by disruptive mobile-based services such as Uber, Lyft and many others.
- the rise and rise of mobile applications - it seems 86% of time spent on a mobile is spent on applications.
"For travel there is a huge opportunity. If I was a travel company I would be rushing to develop the best app I can and then get it installed on as much mobile real estate as I can."
NB: Apps image via Shutterstock.