Mobile Marketing & Distribution in Hospitality

It’s been a while since I have posted, too much time on Twitter!  But I saw a report from Hospitality eBusiness Strategies today that I thought was pretty important, as it’s very much in line with where we are going.

HeBS thinks the following mobile Internet services and applications will make the biggest impact in hospitality over the next few years. We’re already doing 1 for a number of clients, planning 2, and now thinking about the rest …

1. Mobile Hotel Websites: Hoteliers should offer a mobile website specially designed to provide an excellent user experience in a mobile environment.
2. Mobile Booking Functionality: Independent hotels and resorts can either use a mobile engine from their third-party booking engine vendor or, for the time being, use a simple reservation request form.
3. M-CRM and Customer Service: Custom-tailored services and offerings, based on knowing your customers, matching customer preferences, and predicting behavioral techniques are only part of personalizing the customer service in this space.
4. M-Lists: Opt-in Customer Mobile Text Link Creation: text messaging is huge and growing. Mobile text marketing has to overcome some serious obstacles, but it's a good idea to start creating and expanding the hotel's m-list.
5. Mobile Advertising: eMarketer projects that mobile advertising will rise from $648 million in 2008 to $3.3 billion in 2013.

Read the full report (as a PDF) here.