Here's a peek at the hotel guest experience in the near future, with mobile phones becoming an increasingly important marketing and CRM channel, improving technology and awareness will soon allow hotel marketers to enhance the hotel guest interaction, in a very similar way to what's described below… 

Hotel Booking and Research

Sam wants to book a hotel for an overnight stay in a nearby city in a week's time.

He visits a website to look for hotels to see what's available.

He sees a hotel he likes and book a room online.

As part of the booking procedure Sam is asked to enter his email address and his mobile phone number.

He's instantly sent both an email and an SMS message confirming his booking.

The SMS message is addressed to Sam personally and contains his booking reference and the dates of his stay.

Both the email and SMS message contain a link to a specially built hotel website that can be browsed and navigated upon using any mobile phone.

This mobile website can detect what type of mobile phone is accessing it and can display the relevant content in the right screen size, so that it's easily navigated regardless of whether Sam has a Blackberry, Nokia, iPhone, Sony Erickson, Motorola, Samsung or any other type of mobile phone.

The mobile site contains the same type of content contained on the hotels traditional website, but the content has been optimised to be viewed and displayed on a mobile phone.

The information on the site is displayed in small packets. Sam doesn't spend hours browsing the internet on his phone, as he prefers to do that on the bigger screen size on his laptop, so instead wants his information presented to him in a straightforward format that's easy to find and easy to read.

On his mobile phone, Sam has a range of options that he can choose to use. He can look at a range of 30 second videos highlighting the different facilities of the hotel, he can look at the various F&B venues and what he's particularly interested in, he can download mobile vouchers that will give him 20% off of a bill of any F&B location that he likes the look of.

Sam is interested in a particular F&B location and he can choose from a couple of options.

Sam can:

• Check out the menu
• He's a sports fan so he can see what games they're showing during the dates of his stay.
• He can book a table (including one next to the TV so he's got a great view of the game)
• He can even leave a message on the site, letting other people know that he's going to be there and what team he supports, if other fans are showing up too.
• If he wants to eat, he can even pre-order his preferences on the menu.
• He can also recommend this location to some friends to see what they think of the place.
• He decides to recommend the bar to a friend to see what they think of it and he's instantly taken to his list of contacts in his mobile phone book. He selects the friend he wants to send the details of the store too and seconds later, Sam's friend receives this invite into his inbox, and he gives Sam the thumbs up.

Following Sam's friend saying he thinks that the bar looks pretty good, Sam clicks a link to request a confirmation of his table booking to be sent to his phone via either SMS, Email or picture message. Now he's got the confirmation and contact details stored on his phone.

He's also invited to download the mobile voucher to his phone that gives him 20% off. All he has to do is show the voucher on his phone when he's presented with his bill and he automatically receives the 20% off.

He's also asked if he'd like to receive a reminder SMS message of these offers during his stay, but he's not that keen, so ticks the box titled "No Thanks".

Story continues here:

http://www.hotelemarketer.com/hotel-digital-marketing/hotel-internet-mobile-marketing/hotel-mobile-marketing-a-hotel-guest-story-from-the-near-future

About the author: Matt is a contributing author at www.HoteleMarketer.com. Currently based in Dubai, he is a Mobile Tech Enthusiast and Expert, with over 10 years of experience providing end-to-end and creative mobile solutions. Matt's company, PureMobile, are a mobile solution provider that use SMS, the mobile internet and much much more to help brands achieve their marketing objectives and business goals. Find out more at www.puremobileonline.com