Wednesday 1 September 2010

Hotel Smartphone website brings more bookings than Apps

AXSES Smartphone Hotel and Tourism Marketing Strategy

This blog is a little out of step with the way we do things. First, we are sharing our Smartphone Marketing strategy while the mobile products we discuss are being developed. It's perhaps brave, perhaps naive, perhaps foolish, but we have a solution that is dynamite and right for the market. While developers are rushing to build apps, the fact is that only 1/5 of traveler users are using apps. Travelers prefer to use the web. "While about a third of Smartphone owners use their devices for travel-related activities, only one-fifth of all Smartphone owners have installed travel apps on their devices." ReadWriteWeb based on Smartphone Intelligence survey by  Compete.com. 


The smart website solution is very affordable and aimed directly at where the smartphone market is now and where we see it evolving.

Over the last 15 years, AXSES has been  a leader in tourism development with many first to market products, like http://Realholidays.com dynamic package and matchmaking for hotels and travelers. AXSES created http://Bookable-maps. Commended by Google, Bookable-ads.com,  is a first in merging advertising and bookings, making adds more effective and dramatically increasing the travelers' time on the site and their click rate. We were first with our  direct bookings application for facebook, allowing small and mid-size hotels, car rentals and tourism suppliers to load and manage their info directly into Facebook using arcRes Publishing.

You will note from our last blog that we feel hotel and tourism operators need to move quickly to make their information and marketing efforts Smartphone-ready.  But we are not proposing that they have to develop new websites or smartphone apps. What we propose is to treat this market just as we do Facebook add-ons. We are now enhancing arcRes publishing, adding a Mobile Module for smartphones.

What this means is that we create a standard way for information to be loaded, stored and managed for websites, for Smartphone applications, Web 2.0 applications, like Facebook, and for Web marketing.

For clients already using arcRes as a booking engine or a marketing system, getting onto Smartphone is just a few clicks away.

For hotels and tourism operators not already using acrRes, there is no better time to sign up and get Smartphone mobile. For tourism suppliers who  have a booking engine, arcRes will step through a setup and publish the Smartphone website and  marketing system. arcRes is the complete publishing system for website information, booking engines, Facebook pages, special promotions, collaborative marketing, packaging and marketing.

See the video as an example of what we mean.



What does it mean to tourism operators, hotels, car rentals, restaurants, tours and local attractions?:

For arcRes clients, there is no fee to create the mobile website as they will already have the content is arcRes and just need to tweak it. We will host the smartphone website and bookings for 25$ per month. For non-arcRes users, there is small cost to set up and hoist the new smartphone website.

No bad, considering the size of the market. For More on AXSES arcRes, see arcRes: the Complete Tourism Platform at http://tourism-marketing-platform.com | For More on AXSES Smartphone Travel marketing applications, see http://SmartphoneTravelApps.com

 Final word on Apps vs. Smart websites

I don't believe the industry will put up with this idea that every  Smartphone must have its own app. That worked when there was only iPhone. With Android, the game has changed. Their are over 40 manufacturers and the pace of innovation and new products in unprecedented. Check out the latest Motorola Droidx 4.3 inch display . Apple is already falling behind. Open your technology and do the proper job. You are about to repeat your past when you could embrace much more. Be open; you have so much to give!

 "61.6 million Smartphones were sold in the second quarter of 2010, as compared to just over 40 million in 2009, with the biggest change coming in operating systems. Android overtook Apple's iOS for the number three spot worldwide and passed Research In Motion's operating system to take the number one spot in the U.S" Garner .

More like this: see our Hubpage apps vs websites- whats the difference
Check our research pages at http://research.SmartphoneTraveller.com

Coming soon - Tools to build your App or Website | The demise of the App