Hotels and restaurants around the world are now discovering the advantages of owning an app. They have recognized how these tiny applications can contribute to boost in their business. The implementation of an app turns out to advantageous when it can provide a variety of utility services to potentials customers or to those who are called guest in the hospitality business. This post is an effort to assist hotels & restaurants to get a perfect app developer to bring their offerings to mobile platforms.
Like any other business, hospitality and travel establishments too need to receive more and more customers to keep going. They can generate great revenue if they succeed to attract to the customers on-the-go. To do this, they try both ways: traditional and digital but now, they have an ultimate tool. It’s the smartphone that provides unlimited scopes and opportunities to businesses engaged in hospitality industry. A customized mobile app development can power customers to easily access hotels and restaurants. Hospitality businesses really like the concept of mobile apps and yes, many are hiring mobile app development companies to bring their offerings to mobile platforms.
A number of hotels and restaurants have exposed to the fact that mobile apps can help them provide customers with an improved method of making reservations. Customers really feel happy when they are able to book reservations in hotel or restaurants, even for the same day. Other services that apps for hospitality and restaurants can provide include GPS navigation to guide people for directions, roads and places along with providing information about special offers and various other facilities.
Take the example Hotels.com which, through its app with same name, provides stay-reservations services in thousands of hotels across the world. The app provides an interactive experience of booking hotel-stays. There are other companies providing similar services through mobile applications. Apps can pass on following benefits to hotels and restaurants:
- Apart from offering core services, app can be used to showcase shopping stores, bars and various other attractions at a particular location.
- Apps can provide customers/ guests with additional information related to areas of interests at a particular location, along with providing ways /directions to reach there, etc.
- Apps can also provide utility information such as phone number, operations-hours, entrance fee, city culture & festivals, etc.
- With these apps users can tag their favorite places, give ratings and reviews.
- A GPS enabled app for hotels & traveling ensures guests to never get lost while travelling between different locations.
Every feature, as mentioned above, can be added to the app but only when you hire an expert mobile application development team.
When getting an app developed for a hotel, make sure it provides following information to end-user who would be your customers or guests.
- General information
- Images of interiors and exterior
- Room availability checker
- Stay-booking feature
- discount / offers redemption option
- Menu of food items
- Room service
- Social media community services
- Review / feedback / start ratings option
A good app, apart from providing internal information of hotels, also provides additional information such as:
- Archeological monuments
- Beaches, sightseeing venues, museums etc
- Restaurants, taverns, bars
- Local Weather
- Useful phone numbers (taxi booking, doctors, pharmacies, police etc)
But the success of a hospitality or travel app will completely depend on its development process. When it comes to designing, development, implementation and marketing of a hospitality or travel app, the fundamental approaches are as follows:
Make your app absolutely free.
First and foremost, a hospitality app should be available free of cost. You do not even need to integrate advertisement because generating revenue through app-ads isn’t the key motive behind the app. You will generate revenue by offering services, instead. Let your app be like this only.
Exploit the capabilities of smartphone
Modern smartphones come with a range of features. The blend of these features can make an app really stand out of the crowd. A phone’s various sensors, GPS, multi-touch capability, camera and the ability of reading bar code / QR code have become base to an innovative application aiding you to easily beat competitors. All it requires is the smartness of your mobile application development team.
Keep content fresh
Content is everything. The more you keep it fresh, the more you have chances to keep receiving inquiries to your services. Content doesn’t only cover the text part but also the images, videos and other stuff. Get the app designed in way so that you can quickly make changes to the content.
Make navigation trouble-free and offerings findable.
Customers want things to happen as quickly as possible. When using your app, they would not want to see it freezing, not delivering the best results out of the search and not having the required features for filtration.
Stay innovative, all ways, all the ways.
Mobile application development technology is still evolving and, that’s why no hard and fast rule is applied. It means you can take risks in terms of implementing new features. Apply the trial and error method and then find the things that deliver best results.
Never ever underestimate promotion and marketing
People live in the world of hundreds of types of similar products and, they come to know about each of them only when they are informed. This is what we say marketing – inform people about your offerings. There are several promotion and marketing activities like on-site signage, social media, advertising, public relations, direct mail and customer service to build interests around an app and increase the number of downloads.
Author Bio
Sofia is a digital marketing expert in Rapidsofttechnologies, a prominent mobile app development company which provides ios and android app development services across the global. She loves to write on latest mobile trends, mobile technologies, startups and enterprises.
No Comments
Leave a comment Cancel