The votes are in, the finalists named and come October the judges must decide on the travel industry’s best app

The competition to award the best mobile app in travel is hotting up. This year’s judges Graham Cook, Managing Director of Indigo Insight and Volker Glaeser, Member of the Advisory Board of Mondia Media could not decide on a final four, so in the end there were five. In no particular order they are Thomas Cook, Guidepal, IHG, Jet2Holidays and hotels.com.

“The quality and depth of this year’s entrants made it extremely tough for the judges to choose the finalists so the 10-minute pitches at the finals in Berlin will be more important than ever,” says Julia Heighton, EyeforTravel’s Global Event Director who is running this year’s Online Marketing, Mobile & Social Media Event to be held in Berlin next month.

Ten entrants judged on a number of criteria including design, features, user experience, speed & performance and more. In Berlin, the final five will have one last chance to impress the judges in a ten-minute final pitch.

Ahead of the event, we asked the finalists why they believe their mobile app stands out. Intercontinental Hotel Group’s (IHG) mobile and social media manager, Fabrizio Di Martino, believes that his firm has a very strong story to tell in terms of marketing activities, customer satisfaction and innovation. Not only has the firm outstripped its closest competitors in terms of app downloads, revenues from mobile bookings have almost doubled since last year and customer satisfaction levels score an impressive 4.2 in the App Store.

Recognising that loyalty towards tour operators is low, Thomas Cook realised it really needed to add value in order to stand out. Brita Hanafy, Thomas Cook’s CRM project manager with responsibility for the Travelguide app has this to say:  “We had a clear objective to strengthen customer loyalty and we did that by giving the customer useful information in the app such as hotel descriptions, contacts with local reps, transfer details and the ability to book excursions.” The app also has what Hanafy describes as a first of its kind augmented reality feature.

Mattias Borg CEO & co-founder of GuidePal, a travel app that can be used through the whole travel cycle, from pre-planning to becoming a sort of in-destination concierge, believes its state of the art user interface with intuitive functionality will win the day. Unlike Thomas Cook and IHG, Guidepal’s advantage is that it has always been mobile first, but will this give it the edge?

Hotels.com, another mobile first player, has the advantage of global scale. Lorenza Pupillo marketing manager hotels.com says: “We are proud to have released a product that has reached 35 million downloads globally putting the customer at the centre of everything we do.”

Since 2011 hotels.com has invested heavily in its apps to which are now available in 37 languages and customised for each individual market needs such as payment methods or preferences. According to Pupillo, listening to customers is crucial and customer tests are essential to understand where there is room for improvement.

As the first package holiday company in the UK to launch a fully transactional app, Jet2holidays believes it is in with a strong chance. It based its decision to develop an app on internal research, which showed an increasing number of people browsing for holidays via their mobile phone. Joe McCarroll, User Experience Manager at Jet2Holidays says that when developing an app, the most important thing is to know your audience. “For us, customer insight and usability testing was the best route to understand what our core customers wanted and expected,” he says.

As all five finalists prepare their pitches ahead of the awards next month one thing is for sure, the judges are going to have a tough decision to make afterwards.