NEW YORK—The online distribution space is one of the hottest areas of hospitality right now, with everyone looking to get a larger piece of the pie. And as more and more guests depend on mobile for their needs, companies have to find a way to compete in that space. And that means apps. Button—a contextual commerce marketplace that powers connections into the mobile app economy—recently partnered with Hotels.com to drive app installs and bookings in mobile.
How does it work? Button connects the Hotels.com app to millions of new users globally and re-engages existing customers across its marketplace of publishers. “We’re trying to create an environment where we can try to predict what consumer intent is at any given moment within the mobile world, and where that intent materializes, do our best to match that intent with whatever company or service or product can fulfill it best,” said Michael Jaconi, founder and CEO of Button.
So, for instance, say a user is reading about London travel in the fall in a travel review app. The app would have a button for Hotels.com that would take the user directly into Hotels.com’s app to book a trip. Or the button might appear in apps that book flights, so the user can then book a room for the night.
“If you think about the world we live in now with mobile, you have this very app-driven and siloed experience where as we’re researching something, we’re inside of one experience—whether that’s a review site, content publication or a magazine that has been translated to mobile. In any of those experiences, if you have intent to go visit the location you’ve been studying, you don’t have a great way to connect and actually complete the transaction or book your stay,” said Jaconi.
This historically has been done through mobile web, but Jaconi noted that there are many pain points for consumers associated with mobile web, where login, preferences and payment information is not automatically known the way it is inside a mobile app. “That’s why mobile web has suffered so greatly and why every retailer has invested in building their own application,” said Jaconi.
That is also shown in the data. “When you look at any app that sells something, at the conversion rates they drive inside of their mobile apps vs. the traffic they drive inside of the mobile web, the conversion rates are typically 400% to 500% better than mobile web when you drive traffic into your app,” he said.
Jaconi said the partnership was beneficial to all. Consumers get a more efficient and informative app experience, while partners in the marketplace such as Hotels.com get access to new users. And the publishers, “which can be anybody—a magazine, a travel review app, any type of mobile site or app that is trying to create a connection to a consumer—tap into a revenue stream that’s been proven throughout every cycle in the digital or physical economy: If someone drives traffic from one place and it results in a transaction in another place, the source of that traffic ultimately, is paid a revenue share. We help facilitate that affiliate model in mobile,” he said.
“The other cool part is by building and integrating with Hotels.com. Now if they want to launch a new partnership, they don’t have to do any work,” Jaconi continued. “Once they become part of Button’s platform, they can facilitate these partnerships without having to lift a finger. They want to be able to scale these partnerships and what we’ve recognized is most companies don’t have an abundance of mobile engineers or resources so to do even one partnership is really tough. Integrate with us and we’ll spread you across all the partners who work with us and any new partners you want to bring to us—that reduction in resource allocation for both sides of the marketplace has been one of the greatest ingredients to our success.”
Speaking to broader trends in hospitality, Jaconi noted that Hotels.com may be the first big platform to engage in this space, but it won’t be the only platform to look at solutions like this. “There’s a core component in our offering: Not only do we provide them a pathway to drive app installs and transactions within their apps, but we also give them a bunch of deep linking capabilities so that when they are driving consumers into their app, they can drive a higher conversion flow by linking it to specific places within their app,” he said.
“The reality is there’s this moving or growing trend; mobile commerce is going to be bigger, frankly, than any other trend we’ve seen in digital,” said Jaconi. “If you think about the impact and the size of the market, mobile will touch more consumers than PCs ever did. This is going to be the portal by which people use or ultimately transact through. You combine that with the fact that all these categories now are moving to mobile, some that didn’t even make it to the web, like daily transactions, and you look at all of that, this is going to be far bigger than anything we’ve seen.” HB
Hipmunk aims for more personalized search function
Hipmunk aims to make it easier for travelers to compare and contrast properties.
SAN FRANCISCO—At the Revenue Strategy Summit this summer, Nathalie Corredor, SVP, global strategy, Hilton Worldwide, said, “Information is becoming more transparent and available in more places; it’s less of a differentiator and more of an expectation. Putting my futurist hat on, there’s too much information today for any individual to process. The winner will be the one who can sort through that information and help you personalize what you’re looking for. The future of search is someone who can tell me what’s the best for me.” Metasearch site Hipmunk recently launched new search functions, which it hopes will do just that.
Steve Vargas, lead product manager for Hipmunk, noted there are three major frustrations for travelers: narrowing down location, especially in an unfamiliar city; comparing their options; and knowing if they’re getting the best price. He added that the new design is the result of observing travelers go through the process of searching for a hotel. “One of the key learnings was that people were using 15 tabs just to find the right hotel due to this lack of trust. We realized that giving people the ability to choose something quickly would alleviate some of that dread and make that process fun,” he said.
The new design includes oversized images that are seven times larger than Hipmunk’s previous design; amenity cards—travelers can click on an image and it flips over like a postcard to show the most pertinent information, such as a pool or free WiFi; a compare tool, in which users favorite a hotel to see it plotted on a map along with other accommodation options to see where they are in relation to specific landmarks; and keyword search, which allows users to search for hotels with natural language questions. For instance, guests can ask for a three-star hotel in NYC close to Central Park under $400, and results will appear sorted by high match, medium match and low match.
“Traditional search goes wrong mainly at the point of thinking that users have a certain set of criteria in mind that can be narrowed down by filters,” he explained. “When people come in to a search, they don’t have a set price point, list of required amenities or exact location in mind. Instead, they’ll see a number of listings and they’ll get this feeling of dread or feel overwhelmed and they start using filters just to get some context and narrow the options into a manageable list. I think the biggest problem with traditional search is that travel sites believe that users come in with set expectations of a hotel in mind, but really people just use filters to get grounded and get an idea of what they should be looking for.”
Vargas noted that these enhancements aren’t options travelers have been clamoring for—rather, the enhancements are something they don’t realize they want until they have the option. “People don’t express frustration outwardly,” he said. “It’s like how we didn’t know how frustrating booking a cab was until we got Uber. It’s just the process. Once you make it easier for people, then they realize how difficult the process was in the first place.”
