Awards Preview – Most Effective Mobile Travel & Tourism Solution

MM business card.inddThe Effective Mobile Marketing Awards Ceremony takes place this Thursday in London. Today, we complete our preview of the finalists with a look at the contenders in the Most Effective Travel & Tourism Solution category. Check out the site late on Thursday night for details of all the winners.

AirAsia Expedia & Somo – AirAsia Expedia App Promotion
This campaign to promote the Expedia Hotels app ran across 11 countries in the Asia Pacific region. It targeted business travellers, who make last minute, local bookings for hotels via their mobile devices.
Somo used geo-fenced mobile display to target users by city with relevant local offers. Behavioural targeting was also used to target users with a history of using similar apps. The results of the campaign were confidential, but over-delivered on the targets set.

Hotels.com
Hotels.com has a range of mobile properties, including a mobile-optimised site, tablet and smartphone apps, all designed to make the process of finding and booking a hotel quick and intuitive. Users can search for hotels either by entering the city or hotel name they are interested in.

Each app is addressed to all segments but targets more a specific range. For example, the iPad app is used more by business travellers and higher-end consumers, while iPhone and Android address to lower value customers, Android being the lowest. Additionally to the apps, the mobile and tablet sites have been built to reach out to the audience that usually browse the internet from their mobile device and have not yet downloaded an app. The mobile and tablet sites are designed to ensure the best booking and post-booking experience.

MX Data – Tube Map App
The Tube Map app was first launched in 200, and has undergone many iterations and improvements since. The app is free to download, earning revenues from in-app advertising. It provides a detailed map, station information, live departure boards, line status updates, and intelligent route planning. The app has over 300,000 daily active users, and has been downloaded more than 10m times.

Netbiscuits – Hotel.info
Hotel.info is a hotel reservation service for business and private customers offered free of charge. The service offers more than 250,000 hotels for electronic bookings around the world. Hotel.info shows all available room prices for each hotel, so that the customer can always select the cheapest or most suitable room price. All bookings via hotel.info are transferred simultaneously, securely and directly to the respective hotel’s computer.

To support its growth, hotel.info commissioned Netbiscuits to deliver a mobile website, based on the Netbiscuits Cloud Platform. Since the launch of the site, hotel.info has seen consistent growth across key metrics, including bookings and sales conversions.

TUI Travel/AKQA/Aditi Technologies/Creator – MyThomson App
This app is designed to enable TUI to maintain a dialogue with its customers fro the moment they book their holiday, to the moment they leave their home to embark on it. It offers information on the resort, hotel, flights, weather and excursions, plus a ‘days to your holiday’ countdown timer, currency converter, and To Do and My Packing lists. The download and usage stats, while confidential, but are impressive too.

The Awards Ceremony is a sell-out, with over 250 people in attendance. If you didnt manage to get a ticket, you can follow the action on Twitter using the hashtag #emmawards