IN-DEPTH: Travel companies need to focus on a customer use-case driven strategy and let that drive the technology decisions, not the other way around, says Glenn Gruber, AVP, Market Development, Travel Technologies, Ness Technologies.

By Ritesh Gupta

As smartphone adoption grows, consumers expect a faultless experience across all online channels. This is now considered to be a reasonable expectation and the technology exists to meet it.

The advent of 3G, the rapidly increasing smartphone adoption and consumer comfort is also there to make this happen. Trends like the use of the mobile for web browsing and web search support this expectation.

There is a lot of consumer interest at this stage. The challenge for brands will be finding the best ways to deliver highly relevant experiences to users based on where they are and what they are doing.

There is a need to really understand just how the customer will interact with the organisation using a smartphone and re-engineer the processes and applications keeping that in mind. Experts believe the industry is at an inflexion point as far as mobility is concerned, and it is up to organisations to redevelop their applications to meet that expectation. But all too often organisations will make a technology decision rather than a strategic decision without considering the product suitability to a certain mobile environment or why the customer would want to engage with their brand in the first place.

Assessing the situation, Glenn Gruber, AVP, Market Development, Travel Technologies, Ness Technologies, believes the web versus application debate is better understood at this juncture. But he isn’t sure about whether the same is completely settled.

“Too often, this is still a budget driven debate, and a race to figure out how fast I can deploy to multiple platforms. We often counsel our clients to start with a customer use-case driven strategy and let that drive the technology decisions, not the other way around. Are you more concerned about search-driven discovery? What are the performance impacts on performance? How important is offline use or integration with device-specific features to deliver the right experience?” Gruber told EyeforTravel’s Ritesh Gupta in an interview. Gruber spoke in detail about planning for mobile investment, mobile commerce, monetisation strategy, platforms etc.

What do you think are the major challenges, be it for m-commerce or marketing objectives, at this stage as far as the travel industry is concerned?

m-Commerce is challenging because in many cases the platform to transact over are still immature. For all the hype around NFC, it’s a long way away from being viable. There are very few phones that support it and even less infrastructure. Add on top the competing mobile wallets from Google, ISIS and PayPal, amongst others, I think it will be several years until it’s ready for prime time. And by then it’s possible another technology comes along.

But you can still transact via mobile devices using traditional credit cards through an app, a mobile website or an employee with a device and Square Dongle. But since m-Commerce needs to be about speed, mobile apps, where you can store credit card information to reduce transactional friction, has a significant advantage over mobile websites. It’s just not easy to enter your credit card numbers or log into a website on a small screen.

Considering that 2011 witnessed a significant progress in travel companies’ mobile-related initiatives, how should travel companies go about making the most of their investments in this arena in 2012?

I don’t think there’s a single answer here. Yes, many have advanced their mobile initiatives in 2011, but over a third of hotels still don’t have a mobile presence at all, according to recent research from L2 Think Tank. So people are still in very different places.

Overall, I would prioritise investment in improving the user experience - there’s still a whole lot of bad design out there - and try to look at ways to change business processes to take full advantage of the mobile attribute, then platform diversity, then additional features.

When it comes to delivering a faultless experience across all online channels, specialists point out that cross channel consistency has to be ensured within the existing organisational structure. With multiple channels, the combination of how users can use them, increases exponentially. Companies have to find ways to validate all the paths in order to provide a faultless experience. What do you make of handling such significant issue?

This can be a very significant challenge. Again, no easy answers.

But the key to success is really understanding what kind of activities are appropriate for the different channels. You have to start with developing use cases for each channel/platform. What is best/most likely done on the desktop versus a mobile device? How is the mobile experience different between a phone and a tablet? How do they complement each other? And the answers to those questions are what should drive the experiences and capabilities are you building into those platforms. If you think those through and establish role/activity clarity for those different channels, you have a good chance to be successful.

The mobile device market is fairly fragmented at this time, with many platforms vying for market share. With that as the backdrop, travel companies should continue to innovate and offer travellers the ability to access their content across different mobile platforms, so they can reach the greatest number of travellers possible. How do you expect the whole segment to shape up?

I probably don’t see this much different than others. iOS and Android are the clear market leaders today and I don’t see that changing over the next 3-5 years. So that’s where I think the primary resources should be directed. I do expect that Microsoft Windows Phone should begin to carve out significant share, probably in the 20%-25% range with most of those share gains at RIM’s expense. Though I do believe that tablets present the biggest opportunity to Microsoft, in light of their dominance with business applications and Google’s failures to break through in tablets so far. The most recent developer survey from IDC & Appceleratorbears this out.

CSS, JavaScript and even Flash technologies all play an important role in defining the future of HTML5 and in particular its role in mobile. It is widely acknowledged that HTML5 is here to stay and it will be a critical part of computing and mobile experience. How do you see the same shaping up? How will HTML5 transform the mobile web?

Let’s be clear, Flash is not playing a material role in mobile today nor into the future. Adobe has ended development of the Flash plug-in for all mobile platforms. And they are really only positioning Flash for gaming where very fast graphics are required (although Flash tops out at 60fps). So anyone who has current investments in Flash needs to start figuring out a path to move them to alternative technologies. Adobe has pivoted most of their own design tools to support open web standards (HTML5, CSS3, JS) and that should be a good path for most people to follow. However, even though HTML5 has made many strides, it still doesn’t provide the same level of performance as native apps can.

Mobile strategy currently has an indirect impact on monetisation as it significantly helps in building branding and awareness. However, over a period of time, there will be an opportunity to monetise it, too. What’s your viewpoint regarding monetisation?

Branding as a mobile strategy is one of the classic blunders. Mobile provides unique opportunities to improve the traveller experience, which can lead to customer loyalty and therefore future customer value. It can also be a great mechanism to capture incremental revenues through upsell of ancillary revenues and reduce operating costs through self-service. This is the primary lens through which travel companies should view monetisation. The most successful apps are those that are very focused and designed to reduce transactional friction. So anything that detracts from that is to be avoided. Hence thoughts of advertising as a monetisation stream is misdirected.

In thinking about paid apps as a monetisation strategy, it really has to be about making sure there is a strong value proposition that is in line with the cost. For editorial/content driven apps, like you see from travel guides like Fodor’s and Lonely Planet, paid apps are appropriate, but it’s much less clear for transactional-driven apps. But beginning with a monetisation strategy whose primary purpose is to recoup development costs is generally not a good idea.