Apps are cool, so the lure of having an app for your hotel is understandable. Some hotel marketers, however, contemplate using a mobile app as a replacement for their website, or in lieu of optimizing their website for mobile devices. A decision like this assumes there are enough guests using mobile app stores to book travel to make this a wise decision, which is flat-out not true. The reality is that guests use the mobile web much more often than they use apps, and the kinds of apps guests use are almost never hospitality apps.  READ MORE

Tech-savvy travelers want to stay connected to their favorite content, and their hotel choice may be predicated upon their ability to connect quickly and easily. To meet growing demand for connectivity, hotels are increasingly complimenting their Wi-Fi networks with Distributed Antenna Systems (DAS) to ensure that consumers have the best possible experience. DAS systems allow carriers to keep their customers connected, and a combined Wi-Fi and DAS network can free up additional carrier cellular capacity for networks in high demand locations. Learn more about how these complimentary networks may help hotels cope with data demand, and prepare for the future. READ MORE

Currently, we are living in a digital era filled with apps and mobile devices. Since 2011, mobile devices, including smart phones and tablets, have outperformed PCs in terms of sales. In 2007, when Steve Jobs introduced the “iPhone”, it revolutionized the smart phone industry. The iPhone became the catalyst for the technological change. Since then, mobile applications have exploded. To this date, there are more than one million apps available through the Apple store and another million on the Android Google play store, which are now available for almost everything. READ MORE

Access to Wi-Fi is now a make-or-break criterion by which travelers choose a hotel, and this is creating a challenging situation for the hotel industry to solve. Guests demand Wi-Fi access at hotel properties, yet don't want to pay for it - they feel it is a requirement for the hotel operator to provide, just like electricity and water. READ MORE

Mobile is empowering the guest and helping hotels engage on a more sophisticated level. Guests want control of their experience, mobile provides them the confidence to engage in their own time while giving the hotel a platform to communicate their offers. This immediate connection is reducing costs of operation and guest services, while removing age-old traditional operational processes that disrupt a smooth guest experience. Mobile will change the delivery of internal hotel services, and the staff skillset will need to change to meet these demands. READ MORE

The advancements in mobile technology are redefining how guests participate, engage and purchase with hotels throughout their entire hotel experience. Cutting-edge hoteliers that realize the power of mobile are implementing the latest mobile technologies and solutions, so that they can steal market share from their competitors, customize and accommodate each guest experience and monetize the hotel's virtual real estate. The best way to achieve a successful, well-defined mobile strategy is to start with a compelling enterprise-strength mobile application that is armed with a robust feature set. Parallel 6 CEO David Turner explores the power of enterprise-strength mobile apps and their influence on guest behavior on or near site for hotels. READ MORE

In the hotel business, you send information out electronically all day, every day. But have you thought whether it's easy for recipients to access the data, particularly on phones or tablets? It makes sense to think about this, while making sure that you aren't sending too much information, and that the data won't fall into the wrong hands. In this column Casi Johnson of M3 Accounting + Analytics offers 10 things to think about to help you improve both the readability and the quality of the information you're sending. READ MORE

Jeff Edwards, head of global hotel business at Amadeus, looks at how technological advances have shaped the hotel experience, and how that affects a hotel's personality. Are we at risk, Jeff asks, of sacrificing a hotel's personality in the pursuit of technological advancement? Not necessarily so - with the advent of mobile property management systems (mobile PMS), guests can enjoy social, local and mobile interactions with the hotel before, during and after their stay. Mobile puts the personal back into hotel properties - Jeff looks at how this works in theory and in practice. READ MORE

Due to the near ubiquity of smart phones in America, there are roughly 150 million people in the U.S. alone with a GPS in the palm of their hands, and knowing where your audience is -- especially for a travel brand-- is invaluable information. It allows companies to customize content, be it mobile video, discounts, apps, sweepstakes, etc., and deliver it to a specific audience in a specific location where that content will be most relevant and actionable for the customer. READ MORE

Walk down almost any street, enter into any shopping mall, take a form of public transportation, go to various places of work and even be in some places of worship, in fact virtually anywhere in the civilized world where there are people, and the one thing that you'll find in common and very evident, is the fact that a great many of them are interacting with some form of mobile device. READ MORE

In the past two years, there has been a huge shift from the desktop to mobile and tablet usage. Nearly 22 percent of hotel web visitors are coming via “pure” mobile devices/smartphones (HeBS Digital portfolio). Yet the percentage of bookings we would expect to originate from smartphones, especially when compared to desktop and tablet, is significantly low. So, why aren't there more mobile bookings? This article describes the main reasons that account for the discrepancy between mobile web visitors and what we would expect to translate into more mobile bookings: the majority of mobile bookings happening via the voice channel, multi-device usage patterns for research and booking, and poor user experience on the mobile device. Read on for best practices regarding how to accommodate hotel website visitors on the “pure” mobile devices and how you can start closing the gap between visits and bookings. READ MORE

For some time, mobile payment innovation in the hospitality industry has been led by Starbucks. Considered the leader among all merchant categories, Starbucks employs its mobile payment platform to coordinate more than just purchase transactions. While the company's mobile transactions exceed two million per week, consumers focus on Starbucks' built-in loyalty programming (i.e. gamification leading to free products, discounts, and prizes); not transaction speed or efficiency. Mobile payments have been shown capable of serving beyond the front-end to an electronic payment gateway and hospitality management needs to monitor developments to ensure that standards are understood and properly implemented. In fact, the future of mobile payments (mPOS) and related services are expected to replace today's POS devices and media. mPOS processing not only includes person-to-person payments and loyalty programs, but can also target marketing services featuring geo-targeted, real-time redemption of discounts, coupons, promotions, and rewards. For the hospitality industry, current users are termed early adopters, but within 2-3 years mPOS is expected to be the norm. READ MORE

The mobile web's growth and its un-ending need for more data, more connectivity and more bandwidth, shows no signs of slowing. This is having no greater impact than in the hotel industry where guests demand more and more a 'home-from-home' entertainment experience, creating significant network and bandwidth challenges. So how does a hotel cost-effectively satisfy its guests' insatiable appetite for more bandwidth and for connecting multiple devices? Is the simple answer to expend capital on new infrastructure? READ MORE

Whether your hotel is known for gracious luxury or youthful playfulness, you have a distinctive brand—and you take pains to carry it across multinational borders. That same branding needs to shine through in your mobile technology as well—or else you risk diminishing that world-consistent brand you've worked diligently to cultivate. Professional translation can be your ticket to keeping your brand look and style intact in every market. As you approach that leg of your journey, find out the need-to-know aspects of creating global websites and mobile apps so that your brand's personality always reigns supreme. READ MORE

By now, we're all familiar with the term 'Big Data' - the deluge of information afforded to us by modern computers and any consumer behavioral patterns therein derived. Big Data has barely been on the main stage for a decade now and already it's had an omnipresent effect. Organizations across the board are measuring the minutia of everything from the flow-through traffic on individual web pages to aggregated past purchase histories, all with the hope of finding methods to better market to customers. READ MORE

Gone are the days when hotels can take a shotgun approach to mobile marketing and be effective. With all of the latest advancements in mobile technology hoteliers are able to target their guests through utilizing a wide array of mobile engagement strategies that are hyper targeted to the individual user and establish brand differentiation, build loyalty and increase revenues resulting in a higher ROI for the hotel. Staying ahead of the market with innovative mobile/social/digital solutions can mean the difference between acquiring that new guest, wedding or corporate retreat, and missing out on the opportunity all together. Mobile Engagement is the result of sending the right mobile offers to the right people at the right time thus building one-on-one relationships between hoteliers and guests by offering mobile experiences that drive desired behaviors. READ MORE