Tuesday, January 06, 2009

Mobile Travel apps for 2009

A major New Years resolution for me this year is to blog at minimum once a week! During the last two months of 2008 I did not blog at all and I am determined not to repeat this long absence. My apologies.

A recent post by Tim Hughes of the BOOT (and VP of Orbitz in Australia) predicted that 2009 will NOT be the year where the travel industry embraces mobile.

I could not disagree more! Having now completed the PhoCuWright "The Future of Mobile Travel" special report, I strongly believe mobile travel applications will flourish in 2009 despite the global economic crisis. The two primary drivers of this mobile trend are the adoption of smartphones and the implementation of next generation networks (3G, LTE & WiMAX). The research clearly showed a correlation between frequent business travelers and smartphone adoption. Take a look at these two slides from our Special Report:





The key statistic here is that as of November 3, 2008 18.9% of consumers are now carrying a smartphone.










Compare that with our research results which found that 71% of Frequent Business Travelers own a smartphone. Additional research showed that 90% of frequent business travelers have owned their smartphones for less than 2 years, showing that smartphone adoption is a recent trend. You combine this with the explosive growth of 3rd party apps stores from not only Apple, but RIM Blackberry, Google and T-Mobile and it is clear that 2009 will see tremendous growth in downloadable travel specific applications.

These applications will be location and contextually relevant. The affinity between emerging mobile technology and frequent travelers will change the business and leisure travel experience 2009.

57 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hello Norm!

that is a good idea, I'd like to see more from you.

Though I admit I am part of the more skeptic fraction regarding the usage of smart phones and mobile technologies. I think for a true boost first the broader usage of IPv6 is vital - or there will be increasingly IP-problems as for used-up IP-pools. My provider recently had problems related to that - instead of changing to IPv6 they use highly complicated programs to allow them duplicate assignment of IPs within their network. But if all these phones USE the IP-based (i.e. web) functions? Then they face a problem...

Cheers - Jürgen

Anonymous said...

I think you are spot on with 2009 being the smart phone year and especially the year of contextural content. Where travel companies have gone wrong is in two areas:

They expect their current product to sell via a smart phone.

They have not made any changes to the purchasing path.

So when they see their business on a smart phone they have no faith.

It is unlikely that business travellers will book flights via a smart phone unless they are independent consultants. This is because most business travel is booked with a TMC or a partner so a mobile is only required to view or edit a booking or communicate with a TMC not to transact.

It is time for OTA, airlines etc to think outside the box (laptop screen).

Anonymous said...

Technologies are still too immature for mass adoption of mobile travel apps. 2010/11 may see adoption increase. Mobile travel apps are a value added service. Consumers won't pay for them, so advertising will be the only real revenue stream for developers.

Unknown said...

Hello

I think it's a very good idea, I'm a frequent flyer, and I use my blackberry a lot during my trips. If I can avoid carrying a book (the Lonely Planet for example) because all the information I need it's in my mobile...then I'll be very happy. I'm not talking just about looking for restaurants, or museums, but I can review comments about the places I want to visit, history of the city, exchange currency, nearest hospitals, etc
I'm sure there is more information that can be added to these applications....

Definitely it's a big market over there, at least I'll be happy to be one of the users of these kind of products.

Cheers, Mariuxi

Anonymous said...

Hi Norm,
I'm sure the adaptation has already begun.
Please check out our Mobile hotelchecker on www.travelta.mobi.

It uses LBS (GPS / Cell-ID) in combination with large hotel databases to guide travellers to the nearest available(!) hotel.

Anonymous said...

that cheers me !!

Jarza said...

I must say that I agree with the original posting and I believe that 2009-2010 will be the window when the smart phones based travel applications will see the breakthrough to happen (f.ex. recently a mobile hotel booking application was the 2nd most popular download at Nokia Download Centre).

After working for purchase-to-pay market for almost last 7 years and seeing how the category specific procurement and spend management is becoming more and more important, I definitely see the value that mobile travel tools are bringing in. Enterprises expect tighter cost control through enablement of travel policies and when as high as 25% of for example hotel bookings are “walk-in” or “next-night”, it creates a huge demand to get the ad-hoc travel expense under control as well and thus corporate policy enabling mobile travel tools will be highly valued.

Another significant driver for mobile travel solutions is the emerging legislation such as “Corporate Manslaughter Act” that enforces companies to have better control and understanding of who is travelling and lodging where, why and when. This legislation started in UK (April 2008) and similar legislation is being put in almost all of the western countries including US where almost similar act was put together at Jan 2009.

Based on what I know, I would not be surprised if travel management mobile applications would be factory installed “soonish” and the basic functionality would be free of charge and advanced functionality would be available for extra cost. There are also other earning logic models that end user does not need to pay than ads to finance the development of mobile applications, but I am not going to the details in this answer.

cheers,
-jari

Unknown said...

Pocket Travel Assistant (PTA) is a Mobile Travel Freeware for Flash Lite 3x enabled mobiles that offers one stop solution for all the information needs by a traveller. Name any major city/town in the world and PTA will provide every possible information for that place which will be needed by a traveler. The application combines data from Google Maps, Yahoo, Flickr, Wikipedia, BBC, Reuters, Twitter, YouTube and many more to provide users with all the relevant data needed for their journey plan.


PTA provides following information

1.
Emergency information for local doctor, local emergency no.s, helpline, police, medical facilities and clinics etc.(with street address, phone number and map)

2.
Location information such as (street address, phone number and Google Map) for shops& malls, station& airports, institutions, hotels & restaurants, govt. offices and police, hospitals and banks and many more etc.

3.Wikipedia details for the location such as history, demography, culture, landmarks, which will be useful for the traveller to know more about the place.


4.Flickr image results for the location, so that the user can see current images related to the location.
5.
YouTube video results for the location. So that he can enjoy videos related to that location, to get a more clear idea about the place.

6.
Weather details for the location such as Temperature, Humidity, Air-pressure and the Weather-condition.

7.
Language Translation using Google Translation for English to major languages like Greek, Spanish, Chez, Russian, French etc. so that the traveller can translate the written scripts and have a better understanding of his surroundings


8.
Local News related to the location can be tracked to know more about recent happenings surrounding the location.

9.
Geo-Location Detection from IP address of the GPRS network being used is used so that in case the traveler wants to check the city and the country name of the location he is in.

10. News and Feeds section provides more than 50 categories from international news: from BBC, Reuters, Yahoo, CNN and many more related to headlines, finance, sports, health, science and technology and environment and many more.

11.
Currency Converter tools to allow user to convert money amount in any of the 48 major world currencies with in a few clicks. All currency calculations are done based on most recent currency rates. Currency Rates section lists all the currency values from 48 major currencies.

12.
Search Tools to search for images from Flickr, Videos from YouTube, Information from Wikipedia. (this is a separate section from the location specific results from these services)

13.To pass leisure time traveler can read from classic works from thousand books available at Project Gutenberg under M- book library section. Search books by title or author name or even the latest 10 books from Gutenberg. Directly read the books in PTA and bookmark.


11.If you don’t want to read books, just try games section to get some Flash Lite casual games and play them while on the go to pass time.

12.Under section ‘connect and publish’ user can post to his Twitter account or just read messages from his friends at Twitter. Also there is an innovative way to post about what you are doing. If allowed the PTA can post some messages related to what you are doing while using PTA like reading a book, watching a video at YouTube, local weather details etc. so you do not need to type every time what you are doing.

13.Traveler can chat with any other online user of PTA in the common chat room. This can be helpful in getting help from the person who is in the same country or location.



View screen-cast of the application in action at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6H6cOmWEWFY

Bulent Akman said...

You haven't mentioned Psiloc World Traveler. It's the travel app I live and die by when I travel. It does flights, gate changes, weather, multi-currency conversion, basically it's a swiss army knife for travelers. I trashed all my other travel apps after downloading it at worldtraveler.biz

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This comment has been removed by the author.
JFK Parking Attendant said...

I agree and that is why SmartPark JFK created the first "smart" parking "app" for JFK Airport. Simply type in http://m.smartparkjfk.com in your mobile cell phones web browser.

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