Interview: When you have high-end customers that are looking for a luxury stay in one of the world’s grandest private house, you have to be able to offer them a seamless experience across all platforms.

EyeforTravel’s Pamela Whitby talks to Sarah Stanley the managing director of Unique Home Stays (UHS) about how they are tackling rapidly rising mobile use and why delivering any glitches is certainly not an option.

EFT: What is your demographic and how important is this when developing a mobile strategy?

SS: The majority of our customers are high-earners and this tends to translate into people with Macs and iPhones or iPads. Our statistics back up this up. From a brand positioning point of view, we also felt that it was important to show that we are aware of the progressions in technology, and that we were able to meet the desires of our who are often very busy, time-short individuals. We need to ensure they have the option to browse on-the-go at their own convenience.

EFT: How important is your mobile strategy and why?

SS: We decided that it was crucial to implement a strategy for our mobile users as the number of people using mobile devices is growing rapidly. At the time of developing we were getting around 5% of our total traffic from the iPhone – that’s around 50,000 visits a year – so we were determined to make it easier for these potential customers. All other mobile devices were less than 1% combined. For this reason, we concentrated our efforts on supporting the iPhone first. Targeting just one advanced platform allowed us to use some of the latest programming techniques that only Safari/iPhone supports. This enabled us to build a better experience - rather than catering to the lowest common denominator functionality wise. It allowed us to develop much faster too.

We also get a lot of customers browsing the site during ‘down time’, showing their friends properties they like and where they are staying. Making it easier for them to do this from a device that’s always in their pocket was one of our key aims. It’s a great viral marketing tool in some ways. Peer-to-peer recommendations are important to us too, to create interest and demand in our portfolio - anything that facilitates this is really positive.

EFT: Has your focus been on app development or the mobile website; which came first and why?

SS: We focused first on the mobile website because we felt it was more discoverable than an app. With an app, the customer would need to already know about our company and know that we had an app. Alternatively they would be searching on a whim to see if we had one and only then would download the app. This is a much harder conversion than pointing an existing customer at a link to the mobile version. This can be done when they land on the main website, they could be redirected there automatically or we could have the mobile site feature in search engine results.
EFT: Were costs a factor?

SS: Yes the cost to entry was also cheaper. We already had all the necessary expertise and hardware to build a mobile website so we could dip our toes into this market without committing huge capital. Additionally, the mobile website can be expanded to a much larger percentage of the smartphone market with minimal effort, while building an app would require more re-engineering to support each platform. Each platform, perhaps bar iOS, probably wouldn’t generate enough traffic to provide the return on investment needed. An app version of the mobile website has been considered, but at this time we don’t feel there would be many benefits over the mobile website for the cost associated with building and maintaining the app.

EFT: Are you pursing any other mobile strategies?
SS: The site works well on the iPad already, but we are working on a new photo viewer to improve this part of the experience which we hope to release soon. We may also revisit the mobile website if and when non-iOS mobile use grows to the point we consider the investment worth it. Our main barrier to doing so currently is the availability of hardware for the various platforms and screen sizes we’d need to test against. Current research shows we wouldn’t need to make many changes to the site to make it work, but we’re not prepared to release anything to our customers that we aren’t 100% happy with. Unique Home Stays is a very high-end brand, and we are not willing to risk glitches, as this will reflect badly on us.

EFT: Looking to the future, how do you think the mobile landscape will develop?

SS: Tablet use is growing hugely and provides a much more casual and shared browsing experience – our own stats for iPad use have doubled since we built the mobile website and this will likely influence how we move the website as a whole forward. The increase in device resolution will play a big part – already even on the iPhone 4 and 4S’s smaller screen, the higher resolution makes our photos look far better than they do even on a large computer screen. This has prompted us to look at how we make best use of photography on the desktop website. More EyeforTravel tips for tablet use here.

EFT: Is your tablet strategy different?

SS: A lot of companies serve up a mobile optimised version of their website to tablets - this is infuriating as a user because it often limits the amount of information you can get to. A tablet is more than capable of rendering a full website without problem and rarely provides any accessibility issues. We have ensured that our website works well on the iPad. This has meant making links big enough to be clicked with the finger without zooming in. We’ve implemented a new photo gallery, which takes full advantage of the screen size, even more so that on the desktop. So there is no border and fewer thumbnails so landscape shots fill more of the screen. We’ve taken advantage of swipe navigation to make flicking between photos and scrolling through the thumbnails more intuitive for the tablet experience. We also have a couple more changes in the pipeline that will be pushed out soon.

EFT: Do you think you will translate more bookings on the iPad?

SS: Yes, we have certainly found that people are far more likely to book online using a tablet rather than a mobile phone. It’s less fiddly. Consumers also tend to spend more time browsing and buying from a tablet outside of office hours as opposed to sitting at a traditional PC.

Read more about EyeforTravel’s tips for tablet use here.