HotelChatter

The new application will allow customers to search and book reservations, check in, maintain their Select Guest loyalty program, and contact customer service automatically. So if you don't use search engines like Kayak to find deals or if you have an irrational fear of losing your room lest you check in early, this is the app for you.

We suppose it's also useful for people who can't be bothered to program "Omni Hotels Customer Service" into their phone book but are willing to install an entire Omni Hotels app. Otherwise we're unclear what we're supposed to be doing with this thing.

This is an issue that's coming up in a bunch of contexts. Travel companies either hire consultants or get in house advice about what the kids are doing. Then they move resources around accordingly. The problem is that a lot of new media technologies just flat out aren't useful for things like checking into hotels. We just don't need them for that. So companies end up wasting resources, which causes them to incur needless costs, which they end up passing on to us.

We're actually pretty big fans of a properly maintained travel company Twitter feed. Omni seems to be doing a good job on their Twitter feed, striking a customer-friendly balance between responding to concerns and publishing deals. This iPhone app, on the other hand, seems a little much.