Last weekend I was in Staten Island for a few days, and instead of traveling back and forth to my home, I was going to get a hotel room. Since this was a spur-of-the-moment decision, I hadn’t made any plans ahead of time. So I decided to attempt to find available rooms and pricing via my Motorola Q Smart Phone (very similar to the Blackberry)

Now, if you are not familiar with how web pages work and display on SmartPhones, heres a quick overview:

My phone is a “Windows Mobile” phone, so it has the same programs that you would find on most Windows PCs - Outlook, Internet Explorer, etc. Except it’s designed for smart phones which means it doesn’t include all of the features that the regular Internet Explorer would, yet you are able to see 90% of webpages, although they most likely will be distorted, small, and sometimes you will not be able to take advantage of the newer technologies that webpages currently have.. Most major corporations - or at least those who have a legitimate reason to have a website that will be frequently accessed by a mobile device (think, newspapers, transportation companies -Amtrak, NJTransit, MTA NYC, hotels, airlines, etc) usually have a special mobile only webpages - light on the graphics, very heavy on the information.

For example, Amtrak & NJTransit’s mobile page only has information on Schedules and News (delays, cancellations, etc), newspapers have all of the day’s news.

Most of these pages are accessed on a PDA by visiting their regular website which automatically detects that it’s a PDA and displays the special mobile page.

So back to my quest to make reservations via my phone:

The first website I tried was Starwood Hotels (www.starwoodhotels.com), but they did not have a specially designed mobile-friendly website, instead their normal site appeared, which while it may have display the full website, advanced features such as javascript, etc made the site inaccessible to a smart phone. The next site I tried was Expedia.com, then Travelocity, and then Orbitz - surprisingly, NONE of those sites had any type of mobile web experience! It’s amazing because you would expect those three travel sites to allow you to do simple things - view itineraries that you have purchased, confirm airline times/reservations, make, confirm, view hotel reservations - all things which a stranded traveler who has no access to anything other than a cell phone would find extremely handy in an airport or hotel lobby!

Since I knew Staten Island pretty well - I was pretty sure there wasn’t a Starwood hotel on the island - but I remembered there was a Hampton Inn & Hilton Garden Inn, so I then tried Hilton.com - to my delight they had a mobile version of their website. It worked perfectly! I entered in the City & State, they gave me all the Hilton Branded hotels in the area, told me if there were availabilities, and if so, the lowest price room at that time - all on one page! If I wanted to make a reservation I could do so - entering my credit card info on a secure server, and getting an email confirmation back almost immediately. What convenience!!

Mobile web pages are definitely not going to be highly trafficked, and don’t necessarily have to be advertised - they just have to work and be expected to work when people have a need for it. It’s one of those things that should just work - but at this stage in the game, it is not determined to be a necessity.

I hope that in the very near future any type of travel website has a mobile version of their website. It’s not something that people will be clamoring for - but it is something that people will begin to expect when they are using their smart phones, and - in the case of one company having a mobile website vs not having a mobile website could be a loss or gain of a reservation.

andrew@alconic-inc.com