"Mobile Tourism: The future way of travelling?" : Guest post by Justine Duc
Written on Friday, November 12, 2010
Justine Duc is a graduate student doing a Master Degree in Marketing, in the Toulouse Business School, and recently contacted me with an article she's written for Mobile Tourism and mobile marketing. It's worth a read, as it's got some pretty interesting views about how tourism is evolving and will evolve over the years to come. Here it is:
Technology drives the tourism industry evolution. Since the internet emergence, the sector has known few revolutions. From the e-tourism to tourism 2.0, the dematerialisation and disintermediation have revolutionized the distribution and commercialisation strategies of the sector. And, the tourist behaviour has changed in many aspects. From now on, he is active, independent, very informed and connected. He doesn’t want to wait for information, desiring to get it at the right moment and place. Now, he knows everything at anytime with his smart phone! Not only for calling, the mobile phone becomes, the tool we use to take pictures, make videos, send text message, and surf on internet.
In January 2010, 7.14 millions of French people got a smart phone that is to say an increase of 48% in comparison with January 20091. With a high penetration rate of 80% in developed countries, and a fast evolution, mobile phones are revolutionizing the marketing: Mobile marketing is born!
Mobile marketing is developing in many industries. However, depending on the industry nature, mobile marketing is more or less successful. For the tourism industry, mobile marketing seems to be the perfect way of responding to the demand of the new tourist. As we said before, he is active, hyper connected and informed and especially mobile. In other words, the tourist moves a lot, and needs information everywhere, at anytime. Mobile marketing is popular in tourism, and quite well accepted and integrated by tourists. Tourists are mobile marketing users at three phases: pre trip, during trip, and post trip. For each phase, their needs are quite different: From needs of information, to need of sharing. Their behaviours underline the fact that consumers and not only tourists are rejecting any constraints. That is to say, he doesn’t want to wait for getting internet access. When he wants information, he wants to have it directly. In other words, he is rejecting time and place constraints concerning internet access.
Mobile marketing is brand new, and it’s difficult to plan its evolution and its success on long term in Europe. Mobile marketing has been developed 8 years ago in Japan. “The Japanese population is estimated about 127 millions of persons. Among this population, 107.5 millions of persons got a mobile phone. The penetration rate of mobile phone is about 84.5%. Among all mobile phone subscribers, 95% of them use the 3G network.”2
Analyses proved that Japanese surfers use more their mobile (79, 5%) than their computer (75, 6%) to surf on the net3. The integration of the mobile phone in their daily life is impressive. They use it as phone, GPS, keys, metro pass, money, and ads support. The well acceptance and excellent integration of mobile marketing in the daily life of Japanese people let’s think that mobile marketing will continue to evolve in Europe to become the daily marketing tool of tomorrow. But, it’s essential to moderate the comparison. Because of cultural differences, the development won’t be the same in Europe. First, the way of life of Japanese people is quite different from European. From 7h00 am to 00h00 pm, they used to be far away from home, without access to their own computer, they spent many times in transport, and love mobile technology.
The future traveller will be more informed and demanding. His education and huge travel choices will increase his expectations. He will wait for more personalisation in products and services offer. He will expect more security, and comfort. The perspectives of technology information aims at evaluate through a more personalized and attractive model, which will be able to identify and respond in an intuitive way the individual consumer need. This technology socialisation will offer a real touristic experience. The travel will become an experience without constraint. Various analyses seem to demonstrate a correlation with the future demand and offer. On the first hand, consumers will expect more detailed information in the right moment and place. On the second hand, technology evolution will be more and more intelligent in order to adapt information in a personalized way to the customers thanks to a very performing geolocalisation service. Thus, the travel industry will have the ability to know exactly the customers’ needs, adapting the services offers in function of his localisation, his touristic nature and experience, his need and preoccupation. Thus, it seems that technology will facilitate all travellers’ lives.
Few current mobile marketing limits shows that today mobile marketing should stay a complementary tool to classic marketing. First, mobile tourism is still very costly for the tourism professional, and difficult to integrate into marketing strategies because of a lack of skilled employees. Currently, only big tourism group are able to invest and propose mobile marketing services. Secondly, the cost for customers is still high, especially in France. The subscription to get ilimited 3G internet access is the most expensive in Europe. The problem of the cost 3G access asks another question. When a tourist goes abroad, the connection of 3G network is out of the subscription price, and most of the time the connection is very expensive. Moreover, two other issues can slow down the evolution of mobile marketing and mobile tourism. In one hand, the equipment rate proves that more and more persons have a smart phone. But it’s currently not a generality among all customers. In addition, as we said before the connection pleasure and frequency depends strongly on the smart phone. And finally, mobile marketing is more used by young and urban people.
Mobile marketing is quite new in Europe. It’s still in evolution. Future phones will propose many other opportunities to respond to tourist needs, in an easy way. As all technology, we will see a democratisation of it. Thus, smart phones, and subscriptions will be much cheaper in the next months or years. We should be confident in technology!
With no hesitation, mobile marketing and mobile tourism is the fashion trend in the travel industry, especially from the iphone and blackberry arrivals on the market. But, we absolutely can’t say that mobile marketing is just a trend which will be over in the next years. It seems to be very clear that tourists have all reasons to definitely adopt it, to completely change their way of travelling.
Justine DUC
Toulouse Business School
Posted in
mobile entertainment,
mobile marketing,
mobile services
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