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Independent hotels now have access to their own booking engine designed specifically for mobile platforms. Until now, only large hotel groups (Accor, Louvre Hotels, etc.) were able to offer their end customers a mobile-specific hotel room booking experience. Although customers are currently able to book a room from their mobile via a hotel’s normal website, the conversion rate is generally 50% lower on mobile platforms. In light of these figures and the enormous potential that this market offers, software developer Availpro has made substantial investment in developing a mobile version of its famous booking engine.
Booking a room online is no longer a novelty… booking a room on a mobile platform still is. According to a recent study by software developer Availpro (1.5 million room sales in 2010), the number of mobile visitors to Availpro engines increased by 440% between January 2010 and January 2011. Hotel owners are starting to realise the importance of adapting their website – the “shop window” to their hotel – for mobile platforms.
Alain Bisotti, director of the Hotels Paris Rive Gauche, was one of the first hotel owners to test this Availpro booking engine on the website of La Belle Juliette, a new hotel which opened in January 2011. He gives his opinion on this new underlying trend: “La Belle Juliette targets travellers who are familiar with and use new technologies such as the iPhone and iPad. As we work very closely with Availpro, it was a natural step for the company to adapt its booking engine for these new tools”.
The Availpro booking engine is available to all end customers, regardless of their chosen platform Historically, the online booking engine was the first product that Availpro developed and offered to hotel owners, back in 2002. Since then, Availpro has remained at the cutting edge of hotel booking technology, enabling hotel owners to increase their direct sales and improve their turnover and creating innovative products that offer access to Social Booking and Mobile Booking.
The recent success of its Facebook booking engine, with more than 300 hotels currently using the engine, demonstrates strong demand for solutions of this type. In terms of Mobile Booking, initial booking figures from hotel chains (Accor with 100,000 room sales in 2010 and Louvre Hotels with 2,500 bookings per month) demonstrate the vast economic potential of this market.
Antoine Buhl, Technical Director at Availpro, explains the origins of this application: “Because of the specific nature of this environment, we had to start from scratch and redesign the entire booking process, both in terms of layout and functionality. To achieve the best possible conversion rate, we needed to reduce user interaction to the bare minimum, with a single action per screen and buttons suited to touch-screen interfaces. The end customer will have a simple choice to make: the rate and the room. Availpro’s online secure payment function is also available in this mobile version”. This distinction between the website booking engine and the mobile booking engine is clear to the end customer. Availpro automatically detects the platform that the visitor is using (PC, mobile, etc.) and displays the appropriate booking engine. This mobile booking engine is compatible with all the main smartphones and mobile handsets: iPhone/iPod Touch, Blackberry, Android and Windows Mobile.
A range of new innovative services, developed for this platform and in association with other partners, will be announced in the near future.
Theodore is the Co-Founder and Managing Editor of TravelDailyNews Media Network; his responsibilities include business development and planning for TravelDailyNews long-term opportunities.
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