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Room Key Card- If your property has 100 rooms and maintains 60% occupancy, that translates to your room keys or key cards being viewed almost 30,000 times a month. This medium is a great place to advertise your app. There are multiple ways to utilize this medium effectively. Printing a QR code directly onto key cards is a great way to lead guests to your app. An even more effective way to increase downloads using this medium is by offering an incentive for downloading the app. Offering an incentive creates a sense of exclusivity for your current guests and, furthermore, placing a time limit on the offer conveys a sense of urgency to download your app immediately to redeem the offer. QR codes and exclusive specials can also be tracked and measured to determine how effective each strategy is.

Charging Station- The latest in airport luxuries, many airlines are offering universal charging stations for their passengers. You just put your phone down on the charging pad and it automatically syncs and charges. These have received very positive feedback from flyers and the next logical step is for hotels to begin offering them in the lobby and business center (those are going to be your heavy traffic areas where testing the pilot program will work well). A tent card talking about your app would be a great marketing material for near these charging stations because they work best with smart phones and those are the guests your app will be available for.

Staff- Your employees are your most important marketing tools. Its very important for your employees to understand the features and benefits of your hotel mobile application so they can pass the knowledge onto the guests that they so often interact with. We recommend a QR code on your employees’ nametag or on their business cards so the guests they interact with have easy opportunities to download. We provide live web trainings to all of our clients that go over the features and benefits of a mobile application; if your hotel would like to participate please email us with when it would be convenient for your employees. We can also give the training and send your employees the recording for future reference.

If you would like more information about marketing your hotel mobile app please email us.

The post How To Market Your App To Guests During Their Stay- Part 2 appeared first on Mobile Media Applications.

In Room Tent Cards- If placed in the right area, these can be hard to miss and are a great way to communicate your app message to a captive audience. A great way to use in-room tent cards is to inform guests that they can make room service requests and additional request within the app. Use a QR code to allow easy downloading. You can also list all of the amenities and services that are available within your application that is there to enhance the guest’s experience. Using a QR code also makes this piece of collateral track able so you can compare which mediums worked best for you and your hotel.

Brochure & Check-in stuffer- If you are creating other print collateral most of the copy will be written and the pictures chosen, why not turn that collateral into a brochure or check-in stuffer that can be used all around your hotel? If your hotel participates in paid rack brochure placements, they can be used here too. Check-in stuffers are very effective marketing tools because your guest will immediately see them upon check in.

Resort Map- Although an app can help cut down on printed informative resort information, a resort map is a great way to market your app. If your app includes your on property amenities (restaurant, spa, golf course) you can put a QR code on the map that leads directly to that section of the app once downloaded. If your resort map shows nearby activities you can have a QR code lead to your things to do and itineraries section as well. Guests who feel they are gaining something from downloading your app will be more likely to use your app.

Retractable Banner- This type of visual marketing is versatile and a great way to grab attention in any area of your hotel. You can use a retractable banner in the lobby, in the conference center, or even take it on the road to a tradeshow or sales event. The flexibility of a retractable banner makes it a smart choice financially. The message printed on your retractable banner may vary based on its location. For example, you may use an introductory and welcoming message if the banner will most often be displayed in the lobby, promoting your app as a virtual concierge service. However if the retractable banner will be specific to a location such as near a spa, restaurant or golf clubhouse, you may choose to promote incentives and features of the app relating to those areas. For example, you may want to let golfers know they can book tee times using your app, offer spa-goers the convenience of scheduling a spa service directly, or tell potential diners they can make a quick and easy table reservation using your app.

Lobby Poster- Similar to a retractable banner in your lobby, this type of print advertising can be used to broadcast an introductory and welcoming message about your app as a virtual concierge service. Inform guests that your app can help them make the most of their stay – whether for business or pleasure – and briefly describe some of the benefits and features it offers. You could even use the lobby poster to display a testimonial from an app user, such as an image and quote from someone who downloaded your app and used its custom itinerary feature to locate fun things to do in the area.

If you would like more information about marketing your hotel mobile app please email us.

The post How To Market Your App To Guests During Their Stay- Part 1 appeared first on Mobile Media Applications.

In order to create this seamless interface, Protel constructed a secure API (Application Programming Interface) which enables constant communication between the Fidelio Suite 8 PMS and the mobile application.  Able to access the wealth of information stored in the hotelier’s property management system, Ustay+ enables real time inventory access, booking and confirmations, analytics tracking and reporting, and user-specific marketing campaigns. The Ustay+ Fidelio Suite 8 application enables hotels to personalize offers based on the demographics stored in the PMS, and send them as push notifications directly to a guest’s device, driving sales and rewarding customer loyalty.

This integration benefits the guests as well as the hoteliers.  According to Tom O’Rourke, President and CEO of Mobile Media Applications, “Once a hotel’s Ustay+ app is live, they can literally turn a smartphone into a trip planner, an interactive map, a guidebook, a digital concierge, a social network, and a source of real-time local news.  There is no other platform that can make all of these innovations available to hotel guests at once.”  The app is available in unlimited languages to connect with guests around the globe, and is available for both iPhone and Android smartphones.

Metin Arghan, Chairman of Protel adds, “Ustay+ Fidelio Suite 8 is an innovative new marketing channel that provides significant benefits for hotels.  Since the software enables hotel management to track app reservations through Suite 8, it provides an additional channel to measure on the monthly revenue report and enables a definitive way to gauge return on investment.”  Mr. Arghan adds that Ustay+ also provides a means for hotels to track and measure guest’s behavior through an analytics dashboard.

For additional information on the Ustay+ Fidelio Suite 8 app,

Visit http://www.mobilemediaapplications.com/hm/ustayplus/,

Call 1-866-395-8878 or e-mail info@mobilemediaapplications.com.

Micros – Fidelio and Micros Fidelio Suite 8 are official trademarks of Micros Inc.

About Mobile Media Applications

Founded in 2011, Mobile Media Applications is a mobile app development company focused exclusively on the hospitality industry.  As the leading app developers for hotels, resorts, hotel associations and hotel management companies, the team at Mobile Media Applications is comprised of skilled software and mobile app developers, creative designers and strategic marketers with more than a decade of experience working in and with the hospitality industry.

About Protel

Protel has been providing the Turkish hospitality industry with state-of-the-art products and uninterrupted service for over two decades.  Believing that technology is the key that facilitates life and increases productivity, Protel aims to offer our customers long-term solutions that are easily and fully adaptable to their way of doing business.  Protel has locations in Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir and Antalya, as well as their newly established regional solution partners.

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The post First Mobile Booking Application Fully Integrated With Micros Fidelio Suite 8 Released By Mobile Media Applications & Protel appeared first on Mobile Media Applications.

More than 55% of mobile users in the United States have smartphones and according to Nielsen data, 2 out of 3 Americans will upgrade to a smart phone by 2016. So we’re curious, if you’re a smart phone user, what are your favorite apps?

Here are some of the favorite apps of our staff!

Lilla- Account Manager

My Fitness Pal- This app gives you the ability to log the food you eat, exercise you’ve performed, and weights you’ve measured. My Fitness Pal has a lot of great features: It includes a bar code scanner to lookup food items and edit portions, an easy to use calorie counter, summary views, the ability to set goals. My Fitness Pal has social integration that allows you to connect with friends and share your milestones. The app will graph your recorded weights and remind you to log food if there were no entries made on a certain day. My Fitness Pal also provides advice, guidance and video tutorials.

Kris- Account Manager

Uber- This is hands down my favorite app. Uber is “everyone’s private driver”. It eliminates the transaction and the guess-work on when my ride will arrive, and it’s simple. Uber’s dispatch software provides licensed, professional drivers the ability to receive and fulfill on-demand car service reservations as your private driver. When you arrive at your destination the fare is charged to your on file credit card and theres no need to tip because when you create your account you setup what percent you will always tip. Uber automatically sends you a detailed receipt in-app and via email.

Carolanne Donovan- Content Writer/Social Marketer

Entune- I haven’t taken advantage of all the features but its really cool how useful Entune has been so far. I can use Entune to connect to Bing, find out the weather, view nearby traffic, find gas prices, movie tickets, use OpenTable, Pandora and iHeartRadio. All of these features are available in the app all the time and they are available on the navigation system in my car when I’m parked. I use it to find out about traffic and movie times most often but I have occasionally used it for gas prices and to make restaurant reservations.

FitBit- The FitBit isn’t just an app, but its also a device that accurately tracks daily steps, stairs climbed, distance, calories burned, and activity level via 3-d motion sensor and altimeter technology. You can wear it at night and based on your heart rate it will tell you how long you were efficiently sleeping. The app allows you to track your food and activity and synces with your tracker so as you burn more calories your daily allowance also goes up.

Adam- Print + Web Designer

Fantastical- This is an incredible replacement calendar app for the iPhone. It’s so much faster at finding and making appointments and makes much better use of screen real estate so you can see more at a glance. The killer feature is being able to type in plain language when making an appointment. Something like “Power Lunch with Carolanne tomorrow at noon.” Use Siri to dictate those words, and you’ll be a scheduling virtuoso.

Tweetbot-Absolutely the best Twitter app for iOS. Intelligent interface design gives fast access to every single area of Twitter. It also supports a large number of services for URL shortening, image/video uploads, and “read-it-later” bookmarking. There are iPhone, iPad and Mac versions of Tweetbot and they stay in-sync so you can pick up where you left off reading in your timeline.

Dark Sky-This mysterious weather app won’t give you detailed forecasts, but that’s not the point with Dark Sky. The app uses its magical powers of forecasting to tell you whether or not you can expect rain or snow later today. The fact that it does this very accurately is what makes it so cool!

Brian Fitzgerald- Vice President of Digital Strategy

Wunderlist- Wunderlist is great for keeping track of tasks and to-dos. Wunderlist is an easy way to share your daily to-do lists; whether your sharing a grocery list with a family member or keeping track of your personal to-do’s, Wunderlist is available on your computer and on your mobile devices. Wunderlist has cloud-syncing technology so if you make a list on the computer it will be on your phone automatically. Wunderlist will remind you when you have something coming due with push notifications, emails and in-app notifications.

Genius Scan- Genius Scan allows you to scan documents, save them as PDFs or JPEGs and email them. Genius Scan also allows you upload your documents to Box, Dropbox, Evernote or any other cloud service that is installed on your device. “The Genius Scan scanner technology includes smart page detection, perspective correction, image post-processing. It allows you to build PDF documents with multiple scans.”

Starbucks- The Starbucks app links to your Starbucks Card so you can scan to pay and earn rewards at the same time. If you use Passbook, your Starbucks Card will be pushed to your lock screen for convenience. You can also use the app to find the closest Starbucks store, device what to order and manage your Starbucks account. You can also download the free Pick of the Week, send eGifts to your contacts and stay informed by learning of special offers.

The post Our Favorite Apps Of 2012 appeared first on Mobile Media Applications.

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Tradeshows- Some interesting ideas to get peoples attention could be having a 5 foot tall cut out of an iPhone with your apps home screen printed on it or have a contest that is open to anyone at the show who downloads and shows you the app on their phone. Although those ideas may be what draws visitors to your booth, don’t forget to have some printed materials about your app as well so visitors can take information with them.

Press Releases- Submit a press release to the same places where you normally do, but don’t forget to also send it to some publications that are known for picking up travel technology stories. Your Press Release can also be reused as a blog post announcing your app launch and should be hosted under the press section of your website. One of our clients submitted a press release following the launch of their app and it was picked up by The Boston Globe travel section.

PPC Advertising- Set up a PPC campaign based around this keyword, “The name of your hotel” and have it seen only by mobile users. You can then create a landing page of tab of your website dedicated to app information and have the mobile campaign lead there. If someone is searching Google especially for you then there is a good chance they have already gone threw trip advisor and the OTA’s to make their decision. Having a mobile app adds value to your hotel because it increases your chances or securing guests.

Banner Ads- You should consider running a banner ad for your app on all of the websites that drive guests to you, including Trip Advisor and your local Chamber of Commerce. Banner advertisements can lead either directly to your app in the stores or can lead to a page about your app on your website which would make tracking the progress of the ads easier for you.

Advertisements in tourism magazines- You may already run print ads to promote your hotel, you can alter them slightly to include information about your app. Including a brief message in the copy or a QR code can be a simple and effective way to market your app to potential guests in a medium you already have experience with. If you aren’t currently using print publications to market your hotel, some cost-effective ideas to consider include ads in local Chamber of Commerce newsletters or local magazines and newspapers.

Email campaigns- Between the guests who have booked online or signed up for your newsletter, throughout the years you’ve probably curated a very large email list. With this list you are sitting on a large amount of people who would be interested in your app! Consider sending an email campaign to your entire email list. You could also talk about the app in your reservation confirmation emails: include a link and a QR code to download the app. If a user is opening their email from a
smartphone the link will take them to the app store — and if they are opening from a desktop they can scan the QR code with their smart phone.

 Blogging- Blogging is great for your organic search ranking and its great for your mobile app promotion, win win. Depending on what is included in your mobile app you can go through each feature as its own blog post. Our hotel app, Ustay, offers a custom itineraries section, a things to do section and gallery (to name a few) and each of those sections provides a unique opportunity for a blog post. You can also go through each custom itinerary as a blog post or you can use the gallery images as a visual post. The readers who have the app may be exposed to sections of the app they weren’t aware of and the readers who don’t already have the app may wonder what awesome adventures they are missing out on, another win win!

Mention on social networks

Tweet- Twitter is a great place for sharing news; share the news of your app launch daily for the first week or two after launch. For the first month after your app launches you could tweet something great about your app at a designated time everyday. Once your app has been downloaded a lot you can also share links to your reviews in the app store and Google Play so followers will feel more confident downloading your app.

Pinterest- Start pinning your custom itineraries and things to do. Categorize your pins in the travel section and use hashtags (just like twitter) so then it will be easy to find your pins. Caption your images with “from our mobile app” or “for more info check out our mobile app”.  One picture may not be that memorable, but a whole board of pictures with local attractions is.

YouTube/Vimeo-  A video hosting site is just one of many places a video about your app can reside. Whether you have it created by a designer or just give a quick how to from your webcam, its very valuable. A video can be played on the TV(s) in your lobby, on your website or it can even be embedded into your blog.

For more information about how to market your hotel mobile application please email us, or watch the recording of our How To Market Your App webinar.

The post How To Market Your App To Guests Before Their Stay appeared first on Mobile Media Applications.

How much of your website traffic comes from mobile devices? 

Because mobile is evolving and growing, many businesses, including hotels, think that if they don’t get an app they won’t be staying relevant and although we are huge proponents of the hotel mobile app, it’s not right for all hotels. Determining how much of your direct website traffic comes from mobile devices can help you decide if a mobile app is right for your hotel.

First, determine the time frame you want to monitor. I would recommend looking at your analytics from the last 12 months.

Within Google Analytics, select “audience” and “mobile overview” from within that section. Here you will see how many of your visitors were viewing your website from a mobile device. Next, look at how many of the mobile visitors were new visitors. For our website, about 20% of our total website views in 2012 came from a mobile device and 30% of the mobile views were returning visitors. Those are the users that will likely be using your mobile application because mobile apps are great tools for hotels to interact with their loyal, returning guests.

How much direct traffic does your website have?

Another piece of Google Analytics that can help you decide if a mobile app is right for your hotel is looking at how many of your website visitors come directly to your website. For our website, 30% of our yearly traffic came from visitors who knew they were looking for our website. Just like with returning mobile users, these are the type of users who would potentially be interested in downloading your mobile app because they have visited your site before and know that they want to come back to it.

 Who are your guests?

Many of our clients come to us knowing exactly who their guests are. One app client knew that 90% of their guests were repeat visitors who live primarily in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York and Washington DC. Knowing that 90% of their guests are loyal made us certain that their app would be popular because if these guests are coming back year after year, why wouldn’t they want to receive special pricing and other great information from the hotel on a regular basis?

If you and your team can sit down and look through past reservations to determine how many of your guests come back, than the information you find out could help with your app decision.

Determining how many guests return to your hotel and site will give you a good idea of how many users would be interested in your mobile app. If your hotel rarely has repeat guests than a mobile app may not be a best use of your marketing dollars

45% of smart phone users download a new app every week, why shouldn’t that app be yours? To learn more about how your hotel can get their own mobile application, please visit our Ustay product page and request a demo

The post New Year, New App! appeared first on Mobile Media Applications.

Hotels that are used to communicating with guests in one language or only have content on their website in one language can have trouble deciding if they want to invest the time and money into app content in another language, but here is one really great tool that could help you decide.

Google Analytics!

By viewing your demographics you can narrow it down by language and see what the most popular languages to visit your site or app were. Google determines language based on the settings of a visitor’s browser, making it very reliable in my book.

If you already have an app that is live with one language you can follow all of these steps with your apps analytics but for this example I’m going to show you the analytics for our website.

A good starting point would be to look at your sites visitors for the 9-12 months and you can always go back to previous years if your results are unclear:

As you can see, our website was visited mainly by English speakers from the United States and from The United Kingdom, with another 379 in unidentified countries. Since 10,818 of our 12,486 visitors are English speaking, our app would be fine strictly with English content. However, when we created our demo app, Ustay, we took into consideration that the next most popular language to visit our site was French and added French content as well.

Although Google Analytics can help you decide if multiple languages in your app is the right decision you should also take request into consideration. If a one-time visitor asks you to add content in their native language to your app, the simple act of translations could provide you with a life-long guest.

If you would like more information about our hotel mobile app and how to implement multiple languages, please email us.

The post Does Your App Need To Be Multilingual? appeared first on Mobile Media Applications.

With this new feature to our site, visitors will be promoted to start a chat after being on the site for 20 seconds or visitors can click on my picture on the bottom right hand side of any page to start a chat.

Now, instead of having to look for our email address or phone number to ask questions, we come to you! LiveChat will enable us to answer your questions as soon as they come in so you won’t have to wait around for answer.

A feature of LiveChat that really excited me (as a social marketer) was that it can also be installed onto our company Facebook page. If someone finds our Facebook page and wants to ask questions that option is there for them as well.

If you have any questions you would like to chat about please visit our homepage and click on my face or visit our Facebook page and chat with us there!

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