Mobile is changing travelers’ behaviors and expectations worldwide, making mobile moments the next battleground for hospitality and travel industry. Following up on my earlier brief for airlines, my latest Brief: Hotels Differentiate With Mobile Moments shows hotel brands how to better embrace mobile moments.

Hotel customers’ usage of mobile is increasing rapidly all over the world. They use mobile devices for multiple hotel-related activities beyond booking, such as using their mobile as a room key, ordering services, and controlling smart hotel rooms. Hotels have the urgency to embrace mobile moments because they need to:

  • Keep up with the fast-changing behaviors and expectations of mobile travelers. The bar is higher: Services that hotels are starting to offer, like using mobile phones as room keys, are no longer that new to mobile-mind-shifted travelers.
  • Deal with increasing mobile competition from online travel agencies. Large online travel agencies and travel aggregators are consistently creating better mobile services and experiences for consumers and providing more options at the discover, explore, and buy stages than hotels do.
  • Manage a complex, fragmented ecosystem to deliver consistent mobile experiences. Travelers experience a hotel brand through multiple mobile touchpoints; these interactions also occur before, during, and after the stay. Aligning all of these touchpoints under such conditions is a challenge and often takes more time and effort.

However, hotels are still learning to empower mobile moments throughout the customer life cycle, and there are still mobile moments that key hotels seldom cover (see figure).

To learn how smart hotels differentiate by focusing on mobile moments and how to select and master the mobile moments that count for hotel customers, read the full report.