5 Ways Hotels Fail at Mobile Hotel Bookings - and How to Do It Right
By Babs S. Harrison, Managing director of Phoenix based Babs Harrison and Partners
Babs Harrison
Everybody wants more mobile room bookings. That is plain fact. A number that is thrown out is that the mobile travel spend is jumping 40% year on year - and bet on that trend to continue.
But the other plain fact is that hoteliers are badly fumbling this ball. Jumio, for instance, reports that two of five would-be mobile bookers abandon their shopping carts due to a poor experience. Maybe $5 billion a year is lost just to UK hotels because of this. In the US, where mobile banking is already far more entrenched than it is in the UK, we can assume the lost dollar numbers are much, much higher.
So how do you get your share? Plenty of consultants have programs and many of them doubtless are good at producing spikes in mobile bookings. What I will tell you, though, is that there may be habits in your hotel that guarantee the promised mobile booking explosion will never come -- no matter how good the consultant's program is.
Here are five ways you may be thoroughly undermining any mobile booking campaign.
*Stay timid. Who really needs a mobile strategy? Maybe you can sit this one out, at least for a year or three.
Stop. That is wishful thinking. It is also distressingly common. Budget-challenged DoSMs hope they can put off a mobile initiative but - honestly - last year was the time to jump into this. There's no more room to delay.
The price of delay will be pushing prospective guests into the welcoming arms of competitors.
*Always view your website on a 27" monitor. How many people do you know who pull up their website to review on a monitor bigger than the average London flat? Right: not smart, when the mobile user is coming in on a screen smaller than 6". An iPhone 6 screen is 4.7", just for the record.
My strong advice for 2015: Unplug that monitor. Make a vow to review content on nothing bigger than an iPad screen (9.7"). And use a handheld mobile whenever possible.
*Use a more is better philosophy when building your website. I've started to talk about what I call hoarders, that is, people who try to shove everything on their website, much as a hoarder tries to shove a lifetime of stuff into a too small space.
The mobile world demands edited, streamlined, highly focused visuals and copy. Repeat after me: People do not come to linger and drool at mobile websites. They come for information and to transact. Period. Make it easy for them.
*Only test sites on Apple phones. Sure, Android outsells Apple but, what the hey, the CEO uses an iPhone so let it roll with iOS.
Reality time: smart operators test on both iPhone and Android and very smart ones also test on iPad, iPad Mini, Kindle Fire (a non-standard version of Android). In some places even more devices are brought in. In Seattle, for instance, at least some hotels test on Windows phones - can you say Microsoft?
Know what your guests use and do likewise.
*Never test your mobile booking engine. Why bother? Nobody will use it. They will just use the phone that is already in their hands to call your 800-number.
Except of course for the many who don't.
The Millennial generation is known to be downright hostile to voice calls, many won't make them.
You cannot count on calls to a call center just because your mobile booking engine is bad.
More likely you will lose that guest.
Install a slick - fast, easy to use - mobile booking engine. Today is not too soon. By tomorrow, how many room nights may you have lost?
Bonus fail: Don't have functional cellular on your property. For people who are increasingly mobile, it's the equivalent of not having electric or running water - and yet there still are properties in this camp.
Understand this: people who book on mobile want to interact on mobile, they want to book spa treatments on mobile and make restaurant reservations on mobile. That is who they are.
Give them what they want.
There now. Do those five fixes, and take care of the on-property signal, and you are ready for the consultants who sell mobile bookings - and you will indeed see them jump because for you the time truly has become mobile.