While out at Mobile World Congress last week, I met with a couple of companies in the Travel & Tourism space. First up was Booking.com. The company started out in the Netherlands 10 years ago to sell hotel rooms, and now has over 280,000 hotels, apartments and bed & breakfasts on its books. It’s available in 41 languages, and employs 5,000 people. Its main market is Europe, but head of mobile, Olivier Voute, told me the company is growing fast in N. and S. America and Asia.

Voute was hired three years ago to focus on mobile. “At the time, we outsourced all the work because we were really not sure what it would do for us,” Voute told me. The work was brought in house a year later when the company saw the levels of revenue it was driving. In 2011, it generated over $1bn (£670m)  in mobile transactions. These came by way of its mobile site, an iPhone app launched in 2010, an iPad version at the end of 2010, and an Android app in January 2011.

Voute told me that the decision on when to launch an app for any given platform is based on traffic to the Booking.com site. “When a given OS is getting a certain amount of traction, it makes sense to do an app,” he said.

He did concede, however, that the firm has launched a Windows 8 app based more on potential than actual numbers and that, right now, the app is not seeing much traction. “With half a billion people using Microsoft’s OS, there is great potential in being a first mover, but we’re still waiting to see the numbers come through,” Voute told me.

I asked about the split between bookings made on mobile and PC. Voute could not share the figures, but told me that mobile is growing in terms of transaction volumes. The nature of the beast, however, means that bookings tend to be more last minute and the length of stay shorter, so, therefore, the transaction value is less.

When I put it to Voute that most hotel-booking apps look pretty similar, and function in a pretty similar way too, he told me the firm’s USP is not so much tied to its mobile offerings, but in the fact that its service is available in 41 languages, the amount of accommodation it offers access to, and the quality of its service.

That said, the Android version of the app I downloaded does offer a neat user experience, including the ability, when looking at the results of a search in list form, to swipe one hotel off the screen, moving the others up the screen one place, and replacing the one at the bottom with the next in the queue.

I asked him if Booking.com had any plans to extend its service beyond just finding a room to acting as a concierge service. It seems to me that if you trust someone to find you the right hotel room, why not also trust them to recommend where you should eat and what attractions you should visit.

“We have initiatives around that,” he told me. “We believe that if your customer service is right, customers will come back to you, and we strongly believe in adding value to the customer journey after they have stayed at the hotel.”

Hotels.com

After meeting Booking.com, I met with Christelle Chan, director of marketing at Hotels.com. She demoed a version of the Hotels.com app designed exclusively for the Samsung Galaxy Note handset to me in the back of a Maserati. No, I don’t know why either, but it was a lot more comfortable than the Average Barcelona taxi.  (Actually, given how hard it is to get a hack to visit your stand at MWC, doing a meeting on the way to the event is actually a very neat idea; it certainly appealed to me.)

The app made use of the device’s stylus to deliver a couple of features not found in the vanilla-flavoured version. The neatest of these was the ability to ringfence an area on a map by drawing round it with the stylus to narrow down your search for a hotel. You can draw any sort of shape around the area you want to enclose. Not earth-shattering, but a neat addition to what the app can do.

The app is not preloaded on the device, but Chan told me it had come out of a collaboration between the two companies. Samsung is looking for partnerships with developers and asked Hotels.com what it could do. The Galaxy Note version of the app is the result.

The more interesting conversation came as the pair of us walked from the car to the Fira Gran Via where Mobile World Congress was taking place. I asked her what she came to the event for, and she said it was to look for new ideas and inspiration, but also to talk to mobile ad networks and explain what she needs from mobile advertising.

In essence, she told me, this amounts to the same amount of transparency and analytics the company sees online, something she says she finds hard to find. “Too many companies are trying to reinvent the wheel, when the wheel doesn’t need reinventing,” she concluded.