Some useful advice for travelers, from the National Post:

If you go away on holiday this year, don’t end up like Calgary resident Jason Boutang. He used an application on his phone to translate phrases into French when he visited France last month. He also streamed a Calgary radio station for five hours.

The result? A cellphone bill of $7,763.70, according to [the] telecomblog.com. It’s easy to rack up huge roaming fees when you travel overseas because cellphone companies charge astronomical surcharges just to cross the border. But if you make a few preparations before you leave, you can keep your costs at a reasonable level.

“I recommend that if you go away and you want to use your phone, that you call your cell provider and get a travel package,” said Stephen Joyce, the CEO of the tourism technology company Rezgo.com.

Travel packages are a relatively new feature offered by cellphone companies. They charge different rates depending on the region. While the per-minute rate is still significantly higher than using your phone locally, it will offer travellers some savings. Otherwise, it could cost as much as $4 per minute for calls and $50 per megabyte for data usage, depending on where in the world you are. Text messages are also more expensive overseas, at about 60 cents per message.

Via story-mentioned @stephenjoyce and this topic has been previously covered here. Just as a general rule, even if you have a roaming package, don’t do streaming radio, watch videos and other bandwidth-intensive things on your smartphone unless you’re really sure you’re not going to be paying through the nose for it.

www.travelrants.com writes about the shock impact of mobile phone roaming rates has on International travelers:

It is all well and good owning a mobile phone with GPS, tons of travel apps, but when it costs you £3 – £5 per MB to use the internet abroad, it becomes expensive very quickly. Last week I used my phone in-flight, while jaunting around New York and I have arrived home to a £60 bill for roaming charges.

[read more]

The BBC also wrote about this earlier this year:

If you use your phone in the UK to connect to the internet, for example to check emails or go on Facebook, you don’t usually need to worry about the bill – most home tariffs include unlimited downloads.

But, if you take a smartphone, like an iPhone, on your travels, it can have expensive consequences.

One German man was reported to have been charged £41,000 after downloading a television programme onto his phone.

Julia Feuell, from north London, also got a shock after a visit to New Zealand. Her 17 year-old son racked up a bill of £590.

If you’re creating iPhone apps,  it’s critical that your app doesn’t have an expensive network dependency. If it can’t run in “Airplane Mode”, it doesn’t work for travelers (and you’re missing out on other great benefits).

Todd Lucier of Tourism Keys explores the impact of the fact that 30% of cell phone users are now browsing the web (and that’s going to massively increase over the next few years) on the tourism industry. Read more here.

TechCrunch reports (via Coda Research Consultancy):

As smartphones like the iPhone and Android take over the mobile Web, the amount of data traffic going over cellular networks is expected to grow 40-fold over the next five years. UK firm Coda Research Consultancy forecasts that in the U.S. alone mobile handset data traffic will grow from 8 petabytes/month this year to 327 petabytes/month in 2015. That amounts to a 117 percent compound annual growth rate.

We’d also like to draw attention to the following table:

	2010	2011	2012	2013	2014	2015
Mobile Internet users via handsets	84M	100M	113M	128M	145M	158M
Smartphone traffic as % of handset traffic	79%	90%	95%	97%	98%	98%
Feature phone traffic as % of handset traffic	21%	10%	5%	3%	2%	2%

Next year, 90% of “data traffic” over the next year will be from smartphones. The implications:

• WAP-type protocols are effectively dead, except for legacy applications,
• everyone interested in accessing Internet services are going to replace their “normal” cell with a smartphone in the very near future.

We noticed last week at the WACVB Destination Marketing Tech Summit that there were a lot of Androids amongst DMO attendees – not as many as iPhones, but still a remarkable number.

The latest AdMob numbers tell the story:

AdMob serves north of 10 billion ads per month to more than 15,000 mobile websites and applications. Thus, although its data is about ad rather than page impressions, it can be taken as a pretty robust indicator of how web usage habits are developing and changing over time. Android is the big standout of its most recent figures, with Google loyalists now constituting a cool 42 percent of AdMob’s smartphone audience in the US.

Given the trend lines, the Android’s probably in the #1 position by now and is likely to maintain it, at least until Apple introduces a version of the iPhone that’s not dependent on the somewhat flaky AT&T cellular network.

Patricia Brusha, who we had the pleasure at meeting in Montreal in January at the Online Revealed conference, asks “Could Apps Be The New Search“:

If you are researching a trip to Italy, or want to learn about wines in the region or even just keep track of calories and new recipes while you’re away,”there’s an App for that.” It is important to acknowledge that phrase has now become common vernacular among iphone users just as “Google It” has to the entire population. With a current user base of 1.5 million iphone users and 1.2 Million Ipod Touch users in Canada alone [don't forget the iPod Touch - not all app developers really support this and it's almost half your market -- dpj] (Mobile Fringe), 2010 just may be your “app-ortunity” to launch a mobile marketing strategy.

Why now [to integrate mobile into this year’s marketing budget for Travel, Tourism and Hospitality professionals]? According to Sorge you cannot ignore the facts. “Mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access devices worldwide by 2013”, states Sorge, “In addition Mobile marketing will grow to $19 billion by 2012 from $1.6 billion in 2008.” Add to that better data plans being offered by cellular providers making web access from you mobile affordable and the solid distribution Apple has created with the App Store following in the itunes successful footsteps. iPhone and iTouch have over 60 million users that consume over 200 million apps per month – and now there is the iPad recently launched which is the happy medium between the two.

[...] Now is the time to jump in when costs are affordable and before the market gets cluttered with too much noise. In saying that, the same principles apply to every other marketing strategy – ensure first that your marketing budget is allocated to where your customers are RIGHT NOW – don’t go building an app for your ski destination if the website can’t be found when your customers are looking to book, or if your website is not even transacting business already.

[...] The cost? You can get an app created for as little as $5000 [even a good one -- dpj] depending on who is developing your app, and what you want to do. Don’t look at mobile in isolation, it should be integrated to your overall marketing strategy and be consistent in messaging with your website, search, email newsletters, blogs and social media initiatives.

Our take: apps aren’t the new search, they’re the new domain name. If you remember way back when to the 1990’s:

• the good domain names get taken early (try and get a short, meaningful domain name now)
• it’s much easier to be a winner if you’re in early, rather than be in late (Yahoo)
• great technology still matters (Google)

If you’d like to find out more about A Couple Of Chicks e-Marketing, there’s a profile on YongeStreet magazine: Hatching an Idea. If you’d like to find out more about moving your Travel, Tourism, CVB/DMO site onto mobile, well, contact us!

Just to tip our hand on where our long term thinking is, wouldn’t it be great if people could buy tours, book hotels, plays or theatres, and make reservations within a single app as a single basket transaction.

Here’s an interesting report – Smartphone Owners Now Spending More from Handset, but Poor Site Functionality Is a Turn-off (all emphasis added by us):

Key findings from Compete’s Q3 2009 Smartphone Intelligence survey include:

• 37 percent of smartphone owners have purchased something non-mobile with their handset in the past 6 months.
• 19 percent of total smartphone owners have purchased music from their device, 14 percent have purchased books, DVDs, or video games and 12 percent have purchased movie tickets.
• The most popular mobile shopping-related activities are still research related – 41 percent of iPhone users and 43 percent of Android users are most likely to check sale prices at alternative locations from their mobile phones while they are shopping.
• The second most likely activity is accessing consumer reviews, with 39 percent of iPhone owners and 31 percent of Android owners investigating reviews from their handset before they purchase.

While m-commerce is poised for explosive growth in 2010, consumers are still more likely to abandon mobile purchasing on sites that are not optimized for the on-the-go experience, similar to shopping cart abandonment in the early days of e-commerce. Compete’s Q3 Smartphone Intelligence survey found that eight percent of smartphone owners that tried to purchase a product on their device were unable to do so. 45 percent of those that abandoned the process reported that they did so because the site would not load, and an additional 38 percent left the site because it was not developed specifically for smartphone users.

That is grim and probably totally unnecessary – purchasing products from your mobile tourism product should be as simple as buying music in iTunes. If you’re doing something interesting in this space, we’d like to hear from you.

Link via David Eads.

Beth Kormanik in Hotel Interactive writes:

You may be right if you think the apps for smartphones like the iPhone or Android are passing phases. But that doesn’t mean you can afford to sit this one out.

PhoCusWright’s senior corporate and technology analyst, Norm Rose, said the market is only growing for consumers who use smartphones, and they want to use them to make travel decisions. Rose presented his conclusions in a Webinar this week called “The iPhone and the Future of Mobile Travel Applications.” He also is co-author of PhoCusWright’s Mobile: The Next Platform for Travel.

Rose predicted that the craze over apps may last only four or five years, but they will be crucial. Hotels and other hospitality-related industries need to plan a smart mobile strategy that will bridge the near- and long-term. Part of that is cementing your mobile brand in the minds of consumers so they stay loyal to your brand in the future.

…

PhoCusWright found a direct correlation between smartphone owners and frequent travelers. Its most recent consumer technology survey, released in May, showed that people who take more than four leisure trips annually are more likely to have a smartphone. Similarly, people who use social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter also tend to be on the cutting edge of mobile technology and take an average of 4.7 trips a year.

Meeting these travelers on their own technology terms can be the key to capturing their business.

All emphasis added. Note that we don’t think apps are a passing phase – we’ll just get to the point where we don’t think about them anymore. Originally from HotelMarketing.com.

Forrester has released a new report Western European Mobile Forecast, 2009 To 2014 (which can be yours for the low low price of 1749 bones):

As mobile phones are now ubiquitous across Western Europe, the industry’s attention has turned to the mobile Internet arena. Despite the recession, mobile Internet adoption will continue to grow significantly, with audiences tripling from 13% of Western European mobile users in 2008 to 39% in 2014. The current economic climate will lengthen handset renewal cycles, foster the development of low-cost offerings, and boost the uptake of SIM-only contracts. However, it will only slightly reduce the pace of growth for those elements that stimulate mobile Internet usage: 3.5G and Internet-centric mobile phones as well as all-you-can-eat data plans will be widely available in the next five years. In the next decade, the mobile Internet will replicate the success story of the PC-based Internet. As Europe is one of the most diverse and saturated mobile landscapes in the world, the challenge will be to adapt to local conditions to increase the usage of new services.

Emphasis added by us. Hat tip: Travolution.

Jakob Nielsen has an article about usability of websites on mobile devices:

The Mobile User Experience Is Miserable
The phrase “mobile usability” is pretty much an oxymoron. It’s neither easy nor pleasant to use the Web on mobile devices. Observing user suffering during our sessions reminded us of the very first usability studies we did with traditional websites in 1994. It was that bad.In our mobile studies, the average success rate was 59%, which is admittedly higher than success rates in the 1990s, but substantially lower than the roughly 80% success rate when testing websites on a regular PC today.

[...]
Mobile Sites Beat Full Sites
When our test participants used sites that were designed specifically for mobile devices, their success rate averaged 64%, which is substantially higher than the 53% recorded for using “full” sites — that is, the same sites that desktop users see.Improving user performance by 1/5 is reason enough to create mobile-optimized sites. Such sites were also more pleasant to use and thus received higher subjective satisfaction ratings. This fact offers an additional rationale: When users are successful and satisfied, they’re likely to come back. So, if mobile use is important to your Internet strategy, it’s smart to build a dedicated mobile site.

This is why we believe Discover Anywhere Mobile is the ideal solution for your destination for mobile users. Your tourists are in-destination and ready to spend money to have great experiences. Every barrier you place between your listings and travelers is likely to decrease spending and spoil your best opportunity to get repeat visits and word-of-mouth advertising from satisfied customers.

From Krish Arvapally at Marketing Daily blogs, The Seven Myths Of Mobile Advertising:

With a clearer distinction between what’s realistic today and what’s been mystified by industry hype, brands, agencies and publishers alike can start leveraging the mobile medium now as an easy-to-use, creative, targeted, and measurable new revenue opportunity.

The myths that surround mobile are holding back many brand marketers and publishers from leveraging it for a competitive advantage, despite the fact that mobile is gaining more buzz every day. The industry needs a clearer picture of what’s possible and how to put dynamic mobile marketing solutions to work today. Here are some of the myths we hear time and time again, as well as insight to help set the record straight.

1. Smaller screen, smaller effect.
2. Low CPMs.
3. No unique user detection and targeting.
4. Creating a mobile Web site is difficult and expensive.
5. A perceived lack of ROI.
6. SMS is the only type of mobile advertising.

Read the whole thing, of course. We’ve highlighted point number 5 because Discover Anywhere Mobile can quickly and cost effectively convert your destination data – listings and events – into mobile apps optimized for the traveler’s experience.