As hotel owners and chains recognize the rapid global increase of smartphone usage, they are beginning to invest a significant amount of money and resources into the creation of mobile websites and other mobile marketing strategies in order to take advantage of the desire of these consumers to book their accommodations by way of their mobile devices.
A recent study performed by the top worldwide hotel revenue generating solutions provider, TravelClick, half of all hotels intend to direct a greater amount of their marketing budget toward mobile marketing and websites.
Furthermore, 43 percent of hotels plan to boost their marketing budgets as a whole for 2012. Among the survey participants, 34 percent said that their 2012 marketing budgets would remain the same as this year, but only 3 percent claimed that they would be spending less for this purpose.
TravelClick’s Senior Vice President of E-Commerce, Jason Ewell added that Neilson research had indicated that 40 percent of the Western European mobile phone market and 38 percent of the American mobile phone market are represented by smartphone. Considering these increasing figures, “it is essential that hoteliers optimize their websites for mobile use to increase direct bookings from travelers that are using their mobile devices to select rooms.”
The survey was performed during the “2011 Second Quarter Global Hotel Industry Update” webinar, and indicated that 95.3 percent of the attendees who took part in the survey intended to build their workforce or keep it the same. Half planned to increase their number of employees and 45.3 percent were going to maintain the same number of employees. Among those that planned to increase their workforce, 30 percent intended to bring in new workers for social media marketing purposes.
