Skip to main content

How Will iPhone Travel Apps Change Our Lives and the Way We Do Business?

Image
By
There is an app for almost everything. Would you agree? We have seen apps for bidding room price (Priceline.com), visual tours of a spa and a hotel (Fourseasons; with call-for-reservations functions), making or changing reservations with special requests (Choice Hotels and Omni Hotels), checking into their rooms up to 48 hours in advance (Hilton; with apps for different brands). What else can an app do for us?

Hyatt Regency Greenville, S.C. introduced an app to enhance guest service experience. It serves as a concierge in the hotel, allowing guests to see photos of the room service menu, search and get directions to nearby attractions, and order amenities. Room service? Is it necessary? According to the hotel’s Director of Sales and Marketing, 80% of their guests use their handhelds to get to their hotel; the usage of guest services portal has increased by 300 – 400%; moreover, guests who use apps for room service spend 17 – 20% more compared to those who do not.

Obviously, apps have been changing customers' behaviors and the way we do business. The questions are: How far will apps take us? And how much impact will apps have on our business?

Sources:
1. Hotel-Online.com: http://www.hotel-online.com/News/PR2010_1st/Jan10_GBCblueHyatt.html (Picture of this post was also copied from this website)
2. Choice Hotels.com: http://www.choicehotels.com/mobile
3. U.S.A. Today: http://content.usatoday.com/communities/hotelcheckin/post/2009/11/exclusive-hilton-worldwide-to-lure-apple-iphone-users-with-new-apps/1
Labels:

Comments

  1. Linchi KwokApril 10, 2010 at 10:57 AM

    A follow-up news from U.S.A. Today on April 9, 2010:

    Small Luxury Hotels of the World launches iPhone app

    http://content.usatoday.com/communities/hotelcheckin/post/2010/04/small-luxury-hotels-of-the-world-launches-ipod-app-loire-valley/1

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Social media engagement is immune to COVID-19 (by Steven Valenzuela)

By
In the unparalleled world of COVID-19, individuals are flooded with choices: whether it be what to eat or what church service to watch. While there are marketing strategies to get consumers to purchase products to immediately increase sales, it may be a more beneficial to engage with low spending consumers in the short term, so that businesses can keep them for the long term.   Social media game strong   During this time, it is crucial to keep social media posts constant and consistently more than ever before. A recent podcast by eMarketer reports that social media outlets such as Facebook have seen a significant rise in usage. The reality is that individuals have more time on their hands, which is why it is important for businesses to utilize their free time to create content for their social media channels. In a recent interview with the hospitality net, Leland Pillsbury stated  “Customers are going to come back...And if you allow your competitors to reengage with the guests before
Post a Comment
Read more

The 7 Ps marketing mix of home-sharing services: Insights from over one million Airbnb reviews

By
The 7 Ps marketing mix framework is a widely used managerial tool that helps businesses identify the principal components of a service product. The 7 P elements include Product, Promotion, Price, Place, Participant, Physical Evidence, and Process.   The 7 Ps framework can assist marketers in making decisions regarding segmentation, positioning, and differentiation. Even for the same type of products with different brands, marketers can still drive higher sales through the improvement of a product’s marketing mix.     The empirical study about 7 Ps of home-sharing services   Building upon the 7 Ps marketing mix framework, I led a research team in a big-data, supervised machine learning analysis of over 1.14 million English reviews of 37,092 Airbnb listings in San Francisco (SFO) and New York City (NYC). We aimed to discover new meaningful business intelligence through the analysis of an immense quantity of online review information that is created by consumers in the cyber marketplace
Post a Comment
Read more

The repositioning of Ten Ren’s Tea Time (by Eddie Long)

By
Ten Ren’s Tea was founded in 1953 and now operates one hundred retail stores globally, providing the finest teas to their loyal customers worldwide. Ten Ren’s combines modern technology and traditional methods when processing tea leaves to provide customers with the highest quality tea that aids in improving the quality of life and health for their customers. Ten Ren’s Tea Time, the restaurant, has a total of nine locations in the Southern California area. New Image: Ten Ren’s Tea Time recently changed its logo, as shown below. We can say that the marketing team wanted a change of the company’s logo to regain customer’s attention and regain their sales.  Just like they changed their logo, they also updated the website to fit the new theme. Their website appears more modernized than their previous design s, which can attract potential customers and returning customers. The company wanted to show its target market that they know what customers want and can accommodate any customer’s
2 comments
Read more