IN-DEPTH: Hilton Hotels’ Chris La Rose on mobile travel applications

Published: 24 Sep 2009

IN-DEPTH: Hilton Hotels’ Chris La Rose on mobile travel applications

Hoteliers are increasingly looking at enabling customers to make reservations, access existing bookings and view hotel information, images and directions from their mobile devices.

Plus, the focus is also on allowing travellers to respond instantly to hotel promotions via mobile, using a combination of SMS and mobile web technologies.

A group like Hilton Hotels Corporation has to date focused more on transactional options.

In order to know more, EyeforTravel’s Ritesh Gupta spoke to Chris La Rose, director website strategy & testing, Hilton Hotels Corporation about the latest initiatives. Excerpts from an interview:

Over the last 12 months, some interesting and varied opinions have emerged about the way mobile phones should be perceived as a tool in the hotel industry. Should it be related with being more about a service tool or offering to `manage my booking’ and check-in functions plus accessing travel information such as hotel maps and directions? How do you assess the situation?

Our vision on mobile has it filling both spaces. In many instances, both the business and leisure traveler would prefer for someone to help them on their journey. When you consider packing checklists a mobile phone almost always makes the trip, is usually nearby and more times than not turned on. We see this as an opportunity to serve the individuals who are both traveling and looking for things to do locally. Conceptually, we would like to connect with the guest at all stops along the buying lifecycle: in advance of travel, during travel, and after their trip is complete and as they prepare for their next great adventure.

Hotels have introduced their mobile site to support its guests and “their on-the-go lifestyles”. Can you provide an insight into what has been the focus of your company has as far mobile phone functionalities are concerned?

To date, we have focused on mostly transactional options (booking, check in and mapping features). For us, the service is about connecting with our travelers where they want to connect and offering convenience and control. We have recently turned our attention to expanding the services side of our offering and assist the traveler while they are traveling while both at our hotels and off property.

Hoteliers say many of their guests live on-the-go lifestyles and are technologically on all the time. How can one customise information for mobile phone screens to match the expectations of such guests from a hotelier’s perspective?

Hilton prides itself as a hospitality technology market leader with our OnQ platform. OnQ allows all Hilton Family hotels to know up to the minute transaction results from a guest experience. This carries huge potential to both support guest preferences and engage where and how they prefer. By leveraging Hilton’s technology platform, we can provide opportunities for engagement ranging from targeted offerings to real time service recovery both at the hotel you are staying at today to perhaps the next city you will be traveling to tomorrow – literally. In time our mobile solution will be able to extend this service directly to our guests’ hand-held devices.

The choice of hotel for most people is an involved process – location, facilities, brand, price all have a role to play especially when people are choosing their annual holiday. This perhaps makes it more suitable for PC-based browsing. What’s your opinion regarding mobile screen vs PC debate? What do you think are pros and cons at this stage which one needs to consider to ensure mobile-related efforts get optimal results?

At this early stage in the Americas, we don’t anticipate that mobile will replace all travel planning completely. Certainly the mobile device adoption rate internationally (especially the far east) differs a bit. For now, we are comfortable with our mobile solution serving the convenience alternative for an individual on the go.

In particular, mobile has the benefit of being able to offer location-based services as well as being a personal device that’s with you all the time. That offers some intriguing possibilities. What factors does one need to consider before moving on with such efforts?

We are really excited about GPS enabled offers but with all technologies such as these there must be a bit of self restraint and corporate responsibility. There is a fine line between engaging and annoying. We are interested in offering targeted, on-premise ancillary offerings; however we want to be sure the traveler has an easy method of modulating the frequency of the communication. We plan on exploring ways for our HHonors members to control the message frequency.

How can the experience of rich media content be shaped on mobile phones? Which is the best way to approach this?

We are exploring a number of ways to incorporate rich media into our mobile experience just as we do online on our core website. We plan on leveraging the great hotel photos we manage for our brand and hotel websites. Images will play a key role and over time (if successful) videos will be added into the mix. The iPhone platform (in particular) provides a great technology base with the flick photo experience and You Tube integration. For Hilton, we are taking a crawl-walk-run approach here.

What do you think are still the issues which need to be addressed?

Specific to the Hilton brand deployment; we are currently turning our attention to the messaging and marketing portion of our solution. While we feel we have a very capable, global mobile solution we want to ensure our brands, hotels and guests are aware of all of the options available to them.

As for the industry, my only question will be how the carriers address bandwidth and support the continued demand growth. Mobile applications (both downloadable and web) are great but if the performance suffers then your smart phone is nothing more than an expensive paperweight.

EyeforTravel's Travel Technology Summit at World Travel Market 2009

Chris La Rose, Director Website Strategy & Testing, Hilton Hotels Corporation is scheduled to speak at EyeforTravel's Travel Technology Summit, to be held in London (November 11-12) at World Travel Market.

For more information about the Summit, click here: http://events.eyefortravel.com/wtm/travel-technology-and-marketing/agenda.asp

Or contact:
Gina Baillie
European Director
EyeforTravel
gina@eyefortravel.com
+44(0)207 375 7197

For more information about World Travel Market see – www.wtmlondon.com