Mobile’s hot, that’s a fact. In this session, get insights into who’s doing what in this space from a leading mobile travel specialist and an alternative view from an Asian low cost carrier on how it views mobile and the role it will play in that competitive segment.
Gerry Samuels, Founder & Executive Director, MTT Technologies
Kathleen Tan, Regional Head of Commercial, AirAsia
Moderator: Brett Henry, Vice President-Marketing and Vice President-India, Abacus International
Sean Seah, Director of e-commerce, Langham Hotels is a welcome ‘late addition’.
Gerry is, in Brett’s view, the world’s deepest thinker when it comes to the mobile space.
Gerry shares a brief presentation with us and he starts with talking about the pros and cons of mobile and, despite the constraints we see, he says, a big uptake in mobile. His company (MTT Technologies) is based in Dublin and they provide mobile software development solutions to a variety of industry sectors.
He continues with talking about the day when the world changed – that watershed day was June 29 2007 – the iPhone release date. Don’t, he says, think of mobile users as necessarily actually being ‘mobile’ – many are simply on the couch surfing from their phones.
Everything changed on that day in June 2007, he says. There is a growing level of comfort with people transacting via mobile. He tells us about one of their customers – Virgin, for whom they built a Blackberry app. He also mentions the Air Asia Blackberry app that has facilitated huge numbers of transactions. Mobile obstacles are going away, he says.
Kathleen talks about ‘getting the right user experience’ as key to strategy and Sean talks about the three things he wants from his mobile experiences – informing, getting information out there and being inviting and inspiring through the use of location based services.
Brett goes on to ask the panelists how they would suggest others get started with a mobile strategy.
Gerry is quite clear – there has to be an element of revenue creation he says.
Kathleen says that Air Asia flew their 100 Millionth guest last week and mobile has helped with the ever more outgrown infrastructure. She adds that mobile is an ‘experience’ channel in addition to sales with the IPhone and the Blackberry really changing that experience.
Sean’s position is similar to Kathleen’s – look at the guest experience, he says, and ask yourself, “where can mobile really add the biggest value?”
Gerry says that the ‘experience’ could be relevant in some areas but that these soft dollar aspects are not necessarily exclusive from revenue and uses pushing a baby-sitting service to guests as an example of this.
Brett suggests that there are some basic service elements that people just expect. Gerry says that the numbers don’t agree and says that booking ranks as #1.
Gerry is asked about ‘browser vs app’ – the big WIT question this year. He gives an interesting answer saying that it’s actually a hybrid solution that works best and this is seamless for the user and provides a great experience combining both “app’ code with ‘browsed’ data.
Kathleen and Sean fall on the side of ‘apps’. Kathleen adds that the ‘key’ for apps is that it provides everything and she adds that they are thinking hard about creating loyalty for the app.
How do we address roaming charges is a question from the audience. There is no short answer, says Gerry, but people are increasingly using Wi-Fi and that using an app yields only ‘light data touches” (nice phrase) rather than whole page downloads that you’d have to endure with a browser page.
And oh yes, AirAsia is expecting 20% of its bookings to come from mobile in the next 18 months – now that’s a number to heed.
Great session and one that prompted a lot of tweets. I wonder what mobile will look like next year when we’ve seen another year pass in this most dynamic of evolving areas.
