Most everybody is probably familiar with Travelocity which offers discounts on flights, hotels, cars, vacations, and much more. They also have that travelling gnome that is instantly recognizable as part of their marketing brand. As is the case with most companies, Travelocity is making a bigger push into the mobile world with their current apps for Android, iOS, and Windows. They recently released their new Travelocity (Kindle Tablet Edition) app optimized for the 7″ Kindle Fire. They are also offering special discounts on hotels for mobile users of their app.
This weekend I got to speak with Jason Fulmines who is the director of the mobile division at Travelocity. He is new to Travelocity but was previously at Gannett, the parent company for USA Today. There, he was in charge of all mobile and ad products for USA Today and the local markets for five years before joining Travelocity. We discussed various topics about mobile technology and Android development specifically.
Q. What is the state of mobile versus desktop search for Travelocity and the industry in general?
A. The mobile users, specially those that are using phones, are doing things a little different than what you see on desktop. A couple of data points that you might see across the industry – you tend to see a lot more same night hotel booking through a mobile device than you do on desktop. Big percentage difference there. You also tend to see more one way flight booking from a mobile device than a desktop.
Q. What are the goals for mobile search and do you prefer for consumers to use mobile versus desktop search?
A. It doesn’t matter, we want to make sure they have a good experience no matter where they are coming from.
Q. Is there any advantage for consumer to use mobile versus desktop?
A. Knowing the trend of folks booking hotels late and for the same night, we have lower pricing in certain instances with hotels for mobile. We have something called Mobile Exclusive Deals. If you were to look at Travelocity and you found a hotel for $100 per/night – you might see that same hotel on your phone for $85 per/night. We are incentivizing based on being a mobile user.
Q. Is the Mobile Exclusive Deals a limited time offer?
A. It’s an indefinite feature right now.
Q. Will you be offering discounts on other products on the mobile platform?
A. Perhaps, if it makes sense. We’re always looking at it.
Q. What differentiates your app from the competition?
A. I think we’ve got an incredibly strong brand and we’ve got really good supply from a hotel point of view to flights. We need to marry all that together and do a better and aggressive job marketing our mobile suite.
Q. Can you talk about the contextual voice function within your app?
A. The beauty of that piece is that it’s all home-grown, besides the voice recognition piece which uses the on-board Android recognition. The back-end is all home-grown and server-side so that as we learn what people want to do with voice we can react pretty quickly and enhance how we handle certain responses so they resolve better. I wouldn’t call it beta but it is something that we are trying out. With Android being very forward with voice search. Google being very forward with it in a search capacity and Siri with iPhone 4S – there seem to be an appetite for people to be actually searching with voice and using their voice in different ways. So we’re just trying to see if there is something there.
Q. Why has a Kindle Fire specific app been developed?
A. We think that in terms of tablet usage, Kindle is an interesting tablet to us. We want to make sure that we are doing things as fast as we can there. Maybe seen in the last week, a report that came out, that consumer satisfaction for Kindle Fire users is very high.
Q. Does the new Travelocity Kindle Fire app support the 8.9″ version?
A. The current app, we don’t have the 8.9 inch yet. But now that they have released it, we are looking to ramp it up there.
Q. The current Travelocity Android app in Google Play Store doesn’t have an optimized interface for larger tablets. Is there any plans for releasing one for 10″ tablets?
A. We are still looking at it. We have to weigh that versus what we are seeing on the traffic side. Depending on how much traffic and how many tablets are there with 10″, will help us make that decision.
Q. Is your app development in-house or do you use outside sources?
A. We are all in-house.
Q. Do you have any preference of app development for Android or iOS?
A. I think a good benefit of the way we are staffed here is that we can be agnostic in answering that. We have a team that loves Android. We have a team that loves iOS. We don’t necessarily like one more than the other. We have team that can do either or both at the same time. I think that’s the way most mobile teams are starting to build.
Q. What are you thoughts on Android fragmentation and compatibility with various Android devices?
A. We agree that there is a lot of fragmentation out there. We just want to make sure that we have something there that is accessible and usable from that device and if we see lots of traction then we’ll make a move there.
Q. What are the frequency of app updates to support optimization and compatibility/bug issues?
A. We’re constantly looking at as much data as we can, including app store reviews and comments, looking for trends and things we can fix. It’s an ongoing and never stopping process on that front. We see trends of users asking for something. A case and point of something that users ask a lot of and that we’ll probably address, is that – they ask for business and first-class airfare which we don’t offer but we can. It’s something we’re going to look for to implement.
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