Mobile Travel apps for 2009

Posted on 06 January 2009 by Norm Rose

A major New Years resolution for me this year is to blog at minimum once a week! During the last two months of 2008 I did not blog at all and I am determined not to repeat this long absence. My apologies.

A recent post by Tim Hughes of the BOOT (and VP of Orbitz in Australia) predicted that 2009 will NOT be the year where the travel industry embraces mobile.

I could not disagree more! Having now completed the PhoCuWright “The Future of Mobile Travel” special report, I strongly believe mobile travel applications will flourish in 2009 despite the global economic crisis. The two primary drivers of this mobile trend are the adoption of smartphones and the implementation of next generation networks (3G, LTE & WiMAX). The research clearly showed a correlation between frequent business travelers and smartphone adoption. Take a look at these two slides from our Special Report:

The key statistic here is that as of November 3, 2008 18.9% of consumers are now carrying a smartphone.

Compare that with our research results which found that 71% of Frequent Business Travelers own a smartphone. Additional research showed that 90% of frequent business travelers have owned their smartphones for less than 2 years, showing that smartphone adoption is a recent trend. You combine this with the explosive growth of 3rd party apps stores from not only Apple, but RIM Blackberry, Google and T-Mobile and it is clear that 2009 will see tremendous growth in downloadable travel specific applications.

These applications will be location and contextually relevant. The affinity between emerging mobile technology and frequent travelers will change the business and leisure travel experience 2009.

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  • Peter Topping

    I think you are spot on with 2009 being the smart phone year and especially the year of contextural content. Where travel companies have gone wrong is in two areas:

    They expect their current product to sell via a smart phone.

    They have not made any changes to the purchasing path.

    So when they see their business on a smart phone they have no faith.

    It is unlikely that business travellers will book flights via a smart phone unless they are independent consultants. This is because most business travel is booked with a TMC or a partner so a mobile is only required to view or edit a booking or communicate with a TMC not to transact.

    It is time for OTA, airlines etc to think outside the box (laptop screen).

  • Anonymous

    Technologies are still too immature for mass adoption of mobile travel apps. 2010/11 may see adoption increase. Mobile travel apps are a value added service. Consumers won’t pay for them, so advertising will be the only real revenue stream for developers.

  • http://www.blogger.com/profile/04413624050464801801 Mariuxi

    Hello

    I think it’s a very good idea, I’m a frequent flyer, and I use my blackberry a lot during my trips. If I can avoid carrying a book (the Lonely Planet for example) because all the information I need it’s in my mobile…then I’ll be very happy. I’m not talking just about looking for restaurants, or museums, but I can review comments about the places I want to visit, history of the city, exchange currency, nearest hospitals, etc
    I’m sure there is more information that can be added to these applications….

    Definitely it’s a big market over there, at least I’ll be happy to be one of the users of these kind of products.

    Cheers, Mariuxi

  • http://www.travelta.mobi Paul

    Hi Norm,
    I’m sure the adaptation has already begun.
    Please check out our Mobile hotelchecker on http://www.travelta.mobi.

    It uses LBS (GPS / Cell-ID) in combination with large hotel databases to guide travellers to the nearest available(!) hotel.

  • http://ootyresort.blogspot.com/ ootyresort

    that cheers me !!

  • http://www.blogger.com/profile/13453472036942591580 Jarza

    I must say that I agree with the original posting and I believe that 2009-2010 will be the window when the smart phones based travel applications will see the breakthrough to happen (f.ex. recently a mobile hotel booking application was the 2nd most popular download at Nokia Download Centre).

    After working for purchase-to-pay market for almost last 7 years and seeing how the category specific procurement and spend management is becoming more and more important, I definitely see the value that mobile travel tools are bringing in. Enterprises expect tighter cost control through enablement of travel policies and when as high as 25% of for example hotel bookings are “walk-in” or “next-night”, it creates a huge demand to get the ad-hoc travel expense under control as well and thus corporate policy enabling mobile travel tools will be highly valued.

    Another significant driver for mobile travel solutions is the emerging legislation such as “Corporate Manslaughter Act” that enforces companies to have better control and understanding of who is travelling and lodging where, why and when. This legislation started in UK (April 2008) and similar legislation is being put in almost all of the western countries including US where almost similar act was put together at Jan 2009.

    Based on what I know, I would not be surprised if travel management mobile applications would be factory installed “soonish” and the basic functionality would be free of charge and advanced functionality would be available for extra cost. There are also other earning logic models that end user does not need to pay than ads to finance the development of mobile applications, but I am not going to the details in this answer.

    cheers,
    -jari

  • http://www.blogger.com/profile/00616728023513173197 Bulent Akman

    You haven't mentioned Psiloc World Traveler. It's the travel app I live and die by when I travel. It does flights, gate changes, weather, multi-currency conversion, basically it's a swiss army knife for travelers. I trashed all my other travel apps after downloading it at worldtraveler.biz