Hotel Guests Have Specific Desires in Mobile Apps

It might seem like the time to take advantage of this year’s vacation flock is waning, and on a certain level, that might be true.

It’s mid-August, after all, and most have either taken their vacation or have already made plans to the point that they couldn’t be changed now even if they wanted to be.

There’s always the fall travelers, however—not to mention next year to get ready for—and the good news is that a new study from Hotels.com detailed just what potential guests are looking for in a mobile app.

Overwhelmingly, mobile check-in and booking were two of the biggest pluses on the list, but there was more than that at stake here.

Mobile payment systems were also found important, and all three of these together served to confirm the notion that mobile device users were routinely putting said mobiles to work in larger portions of their lives, particularly their travel.

With growing numbers of users booking hotels on mobile devices already—with most doing so for short breaks either in their home country or otherwise abroad, and the next largest sector doing so for business trips—it’s clear that more connection between a hotel’s functions and a mobile app is becoming increasingly important.

With 44 percent of users even ready to use a mobile device at a self-check-in kiosk in a hotel lobby, people clearly want the ability to better control their own check-in processes.

The biggest point about mobile payment options here, though, is that there needs to be plenty of options in this field. With a host of credit card and other options in the United States, Chinese titan Alipay making incursions into Europe to satisfy Chinese tourists’ requests, and German markets favoring direct bank transfers, there’s a clear impetus to offer lots of options so as not to have to turn away a potential customer.

Options, in the end, are what most customers are looking for everywhere. Whether it’s choice of check-in options, check-out options, or payment options, users want options, and the more that can be offered, the better the chance of resonating with someone. It’s all about having what the customer wants, and whether it’s hotels, retail, or mobile payments in general, those who offer the closest package to what the customer wants will be most likely rewarded in the end.