Guest post written by CarTrawler
Even in this early stage of its development, mobile’s greatest legacy has been its empowerment of businesses to disrupt. Today, companies need to keep up with the pace of technological development just to stay relevant. Take the examples of Uber, Cabforce and Hailo, multimillion-dollar companies that have disrupted the transport industry and wouldn’t exist without the emergence of mobile.
However, it’s not just young tech companies that have reaped the benefits of disruption. In just a few short years, traditional operations with an eye on the future have embraced mobile strategy to good effect.
“We want to make sure that customers always have a consistent user experience and easy-to-use booking experience,” said Parand Rohani, Head of Online Sales Development at Swiss International Air Lines. “We are placing particular emphasis on mobile, as our growth in visits is mainly mobile-driven and we are starting to see higher numbers of mobile bookings.”
The face of tourism is increasingly becoming a mobile interface. According to research conducted by SITA, mobile usage will increase across a range of areas next year: mobile bookings will rise by 39%, mobile check-in by 79%, and mobile boarding pass downloads by 110%. The amount of people completing these three tasks face-to-face with airline employees is predicted to fall by up to 30%.
“Mobile has utterly transformed the travel industry,” said Bobby Healy, Chief Technical Officer of CarTrawler. “At CarTrawler, we know well how much an industry can be disrupted but we can’t keep still. We launched our first mobile-responsive site in 2010 and now, 34% of all our traffic comes from mobiles or tablets. In parts of Asia it’s closing in on 40%.”
Bobby Healy
Mobile has changed the way customers browse for products and services, and a logical consequence of that has been the disruption of the way in which customers spend their money. According to Deloitte, in-store mobile payments will increase by over 1,000% in 2015 alone. A host of mobile payment businesses have emerged to service customer demand for mobile payments, including AliPay in Asia, which already has over 350 million registered users.
However, despite the overall boom in mobile payments, research has indicated that online travel users are still more comfortable making payments on laptops and desktops as opposed to mobile. Car rental users from six countries surveyed by Research Now on behalf of CarTrawler in 2014 said that the larger the online device, the more they were prepared to spend.
But some companies are responding to that trend by developing a highly sophisticated user experience and putting mobile first. “One of the features we have developed is a ‘pay later’ function for mobile, whereby customers can book their journey and pay at a later date,” said Bobby.
“The reality is that customers will use a wide range of ways to interact with us; our job is to make it simple for them. A platform-agnostic approach pays huge dividends. However, even with that approach, we’ve noticed differences in the way customers behave depending on what device they use. There’s a huge opportunity.”
We are still at the start of mobile’s fantastic journey – the only thing we can predict with confidence is continued disruption.
Data presented in this article was sourced from the following resources:
