Have You Ever Booked a Hotel Room Using a Mobile App?
Before we start declaring mobile booking apps to be all the rage for 2011, we want to get a better idea of just how many of you are booking hotel rooms through your phone.
Certainly, with the advent of apps like HotelTonight, Expedia and the new Top Secret Hotels option from Travelocity, as well as hotels' own iPhone and Blackberry apps, the opportunities for mobile booking are greater than ever before. We will probably even see many more new mobile booking roll-outs as the year goes on.
While Travelocity wouldn't divulge just how many bookings are done through their iPhone app, they did tell us that they've seen a "strong month over month growth in mobile bookings." Beth Murphy, Travelocity’s vice president of product marketing said:
Mobile commerce is in the beginning stages, and we anticipate this trend to continue in an upward trajectory. Now more than ever, consumers want to be able plan, book and mange travel from any device, wherever they are. Given the success we have seen with our mobile offerings, this market will continue to be a priority for Travelocity.
As for us, we love having the option of mobile booking, but we've yet to pull the trigger. It turns out, we just don't find ourselves in need of hotels last-minute all that often. And since we're usually never without our laptop or iPad, we prefer working off these bigger screens than the tiny ones of our phone.
And when another one of us at HotelChatter was in need of a hotel room recently, he ultimately decided to go through the hotel, instead of HotelTonight, so he could earn his loyalty points. It didn't hurt that the hotel was offering a lower rate than the choices on HotelTonight either.
So while these mobile booking apps give us a great way to peruse the room rates at different hotels at the touch of our fingertips, we're still not quite ready to push BOOK.
What about you? Have you booked a hotel room through a mobile device? Let us know how it went in comments below.
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