Mobile Marketing for Hotels



Mobile Marketing for Hotels

Introduction

Not only are hoteliers are increasing budgets for mobile websites and marketing, but they are also increasing staff in areas such as social media. Hoteliers are recognizing how influential mobile and social media are to guests, and they have begun to put more resources towards creating and maintaining these channels through staff additions and marketing increases. From about 1998-2000 years, a few years after the Internet revolution, in all countries of the world, with a correlation to the overall level of economic development, there began to emerge a new effect of the controversial growth of mobile phone users (Pikkemaat, 2005).

Nobody expected the arrival of third screen so quickly, and especially the fact that they will be mobile. This device is just a few years that overcame all stages of their predecessors and went from black and white miniature displays to two lines of text that can fit up to support millions of colors and virtual computer permits. With Voice, text messaging, multimedia, mobile Internet (WAP), geopositioning (LBS), one can comfortably say that "the future is already here (Muniz, 2000).

Like other sectors, hotel industry also realized the importance of mobile marketing to attract and retain the guests and potential customers. Keeping in view this trend, it is important to analyze the perception of hotels in relation to mobile marketing. In order to analyze the significance of mobile marketing in hotels, interviews were conducted with representative of hotels which use mobile marketing and others which do not.

Case 1

The interview was conduct with the representative of Hotel Four Seasons Geneva. According to the opinion of the interviewee, mobile marketing is a new tools that hotel need to consider. The hotel currently does not use mobile marketing, and it wants to analyze its effectiveness before implementing this tool. The hotel considers other things more important as compared to mobile marketing but they are planning to consider it in the long run. One of the benefits that the hotel sees of mobile marketing is to target the younger segment; however, this is a small percentage of this customer segment for the hotel. The hotel is currently focused on investing in developing the spa and fitness centre, and, for this purpose, mobile marketing will be an effective strategy for the hotel. One of the reservations of the hotel to use mobile, marketing is whether it will be effective in targeting the customer. The hotel wants to first ensure that the method is efficient before implementing it.

According to the response, the number of flexible bookings has increased in recent years many times over. The hotels book more and more guests on the go via iPhone, iPad & Co. The hotel room looks app via the nearest hotel, and let the phone to navigate to the restaurant. Also, sharing the experience is not something more that can be attributed to numerous valuation and mobile check-in services (so-called location-based services) and guests will always share with their network from anywhere where they are, ...