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Tag: iPhone Apps View All Tags

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Like, Duh! Hotels Realize How Valuable iPhone Apps Can Be

August 11, 2009 at 4:53 PM | by amandak | 1 Comment

From the tales of stuff-we-already-knew (but hotels didn't): potential guests who use iPhones are worth chasing. Of course they/we are! Chains like Choice Hotels and Wyndham Hotels are getting serious about mobile sites and iPhone apps so that future guests can get all the info they need while on the run, and it's all a whole lot more successful than they thought.

A Wyndham spokesperson said that potential customers accessing their mobile site "are converting at much higher rates than assumed" and the Choice people claim to have been the first brand with an iPhone app, and they're keen to keep doing more in this direction.

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Is the iPhone App Going to Be the Booking Engine of the Future?

March 25, 2009 at 4:10 PM | by Jenna | 2 Comments

This week, UK chain Travelodge made a splash by launching its iBooker, a free, downloadable iPhone application that uses GPS to find your location, pulls up the five closest Travelodge hotels, and allows you to book an available room at the property (you can also book a room via the iBooker without using the GPS system).

This isn't the first free hotel booking engine to make its way onto the iPhone; you may recall that Hotels.com launched a booking application last summer that we found to be, um, not all that awesome. But will this whole booking-via-chain-specific-iPhone app — like the Travelodge iBooker — become the hot new thang? Is this the wave of the future?

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Tech Blogger Thinks Hotels.com iPhone App Is All That

August 7, 2008 at 4:01 PM | by Jenna | 1 Comment

Back in July when the iPhone 3G was released, we got our hot little hands on the new Hotels.com iPhone application through the Apps store.

We downloaded it and checked it out on our phone -- before we'd even read all the first reviews in the Apps store -- and we thought it kind of sucked, and got the impression that everyone agreed with us.

We noticed it was slow as hell, and all it really did was pinpoint our location and then open up a search in Safari. Whatev.

But an Inside iPhone blogger totally disagreed with us and posted a love letter to the Hotels.com app today:

The Hotels.com application is an interesting mix of a tiny native iPhone app with an iPhone-optimized website. I had never even considered building something like this until I saw it...Once the iPhone has established its location, the app passes the location to Hotels.com's iPhone-optimized website, which returns a list of nearby hotels and available room rates.

Maybe what it does from a tech standpoint is cool, but as frequent hotel guests, we're not turned on by that. A Hotels.com application that seems like a good idea but doesn't help us do anything more quickly or efficiently ain't gonna help us get into our hotel room any faster, is it?