NB: This is a guest post by Gerry Samuels, founder and executive director of Mobile Travel Technologies.
A Google search for "what will Apple do?" returns more than two million results. Journalists, analysts, strategists, fanboys and even the odd civilian want to know.
And then there’s the so-called iTravel. For four years the travel industry has been
speculatingaboutwhat Apple will do with iTravel.
Does the iTravel patent signal Apple’s imminent entry in the travel industry? Is this just another chapter in the patent wars and is the iTravel patent part of going thermonuclear on Android?
There’s no question that Apple and the iPhone/iPad are incredibly important to the travel industry. An "Apple demographic" is emerging, and thanks to Apple, each and every one of us is now in the user experience business.
But perhaps a more constructive exercise is to look at what Apple has done and how the travel industry could apply the "Apple way of thinking" to the things within our control.
Connect the experience dots
iTunes, iPod and iPhone are all about bringing disconnected experiences together. The discrete steps of travelling to a record store, picking a CD, paying for it, playing it in a CD player, storing it in a cabinet, now get combined into one simple process. Choose a song or album, listen to it.
The iPhone and the app ecosystem bring a wide range of experiences together. Using apps from different developers you can plan a menu, collect recipes, determine nutritional information and order all of the ingredients to be delivered to your door.
iTunes helps you build a playlist of songs. Could you help your customers build a holiday? Could you connect your customer to a broader ecosystem?
The app store ecosystem is driven by £0.69 micro purchases for mini experiences. Big chunky ancillaries like accommodation, car rental and ground transfers are one thing, but could you connect a customer to a local Segway tour, a cooking class, a bungee jump or a babysitter?
Apple keeps over 400 million credit cards on file and facilitates huge volumes of app and song transactions a day. Making a transaction in the Apple ecosystem couldn’t be easier.
Are you making it easy for your customers to pay you? Could you facilitate customer’s purchases within your own travel ecosystem?
The teapot effect
My teapot spills and dribbles when I pour a cup of tea each morning. Yours probably does too. It’s messy and annoying, but it’s a small thing. I get over it. I accept that teapots dribble and that’s just the way it is.
Steve Jobs would not accept a dribbly teapot. Put yourself in your customers shoes and walk through their journey.
- Is your booking flow complicated and repetitive?
- Are you asking again for data you already have?
- Can a guest order room service breakfast to be delivered at 7am for each day of their stay, or do they have to make a separate request each morning?
- Are you spilling hot tea on your customers by just accepting that that’s the way it is?
What should we do?What we really mean when we ask "What would Steve do?" is "What should we do?". Come what may with iTravel, there is much the travel industry can gain from looking at things the Apple way.
- We should think big. Zoom out and look at our industry from a different perspective.
- We should create a broader ecosystem and help customers connect travel experiences.
- We should make it easy for customers to pay us and our partners.
- We should relentlessly find and fix the dribbly teapots.
But what else can we as an industry learn from Apple?
NB: This is a guest post by Gerry Samuels, founder and executive director of Mobile Travel Technologies.
NB2:Apple earth image via Shutterstock.