Articles tagged “apps”

Hotels are starting to cater to guests who are more accustomed to ordering services on apps than in person. The complete hotel experience from check-in to check-out is on track to become more high-tech in coming years.

Instant translation with seamless back-and-forth communication in any language is the holy grail and wearables should theoretically enable it. The Word Lens app for Google Glass is the first useful step towards it.

Mobile booking is the way of the future and mobile-only startups with clean designs and fast-moving teams will soon find homes at online booking behemoths that know they need to be on travelers' smartphones in order to survive moving forward.

HotelTonight has succeeded by having a singular focus on mobile. It provides a model for how startups can take on incumbents without losing focus.

Airbnb seems to almost encourage hosts, now budding entrepreneurs, to manage more than one Airbnb property by teaching hospitality skills and making it easier for them to accept bookings. Sharing is certainly big business.

TripAdvisor is finding out that transitioning to hotel metasearch is very heavy lifting, and quite a gamble.

It will be interesting to see whether HotelTonight's user base will really go for 12,000-square-foot, two-story penthouses that are bookable starting "tonight." While some people can afford to shell out $700 for a suite at the last minute, that will probably not be most people's preferred option. Are suite options here to stay in the app? Stay iTuned.

Priceline is no slouch when it comes to mobile, but it tapped Kayak as an acquisition target in part because of Kayak's mobile expertise.

How long will it be before we talk about travel websites as always having an essential, if limited place, in much the same way that we sometimes talk about print guidebooks? Smartphones with bigger screens, tablets of mini and maximum dimensions ... buckle your seatbelts.