The union of smartphones and mobile applications has taken nearly all the industries by storm. These technologies have accelerated growth of customer base for all industries, which consequently has boosted the businesses in unimaginable ways.
With the digital landscape transforming faster than ever before, the travel industry is no exception to have been enjoying the perks of this wave of app development. In order to meet the growing demands of the travelers, travel apps have replaced the old approaches of planning a trip, with guidebooks, paper maps, and other stuff, with the modern ones. These travel applications are impressive as they are interactive, multi-functional, and customer friendly. As the travel industry transits through this fast pace digital transformation, they are facing the core challenge of gaining the loyalty and attention of their customers.
Let me summarize the current scenario of the travel industry in just one sentence: “Mobile is currently the heart and soul for customer engagement for travel brands, and applications are the paths leading to them.”
Here Are Some Significant Stats
Although there has been a lot of discussion about the declining usage of applications in recent times, the stats speak for themselves. In the year 2017, a total of 197 billion apps were downloaded, which is expected to rise to more than 352 billion till 2021.
According to a survey conducted by Travelport in 2018, 84% of travel brands are in process to increase the investment to enhance or replace their applications. There are around 88% of tourists who prefer having access to all their travel content through one single application. Moreover, there exists more than 85% of the world population that surfs through travel and tourism applications in their leisure time to plan their future holidays.
In fact, Nielsen research predicted that in a span of 10 years, the digital travel space would expand at a yearly rate of 3.8% and would reach $11.4 trillion mark.
As new technologies evolve, the rate of change will accelerate much faster than it has ever before. Travel brands need to evaluate how travel application development will enable them to connect with their client at every step of the journey. With smart devices in the picture, the requirement of profound personalization, quick payment processes, and having a messaging service for customer queries are all shaping the paths of how customers are expecting to engage with travel companies in coming years.
These customer requirements can be accomplished with progressive web applications (PWAs), which is transforming the face of mobile application development. There are a number of benefits that progressive web applications offers over websites and native apps:
Accessibility: Progressive web applications are equally discoverable as the websites. There's no need to guide users to stop by an app store to discover a PWA,
Performance: 53% of consumers will leave a mobile website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. With the inherent page caching technology, PWAs frequently load under one second.
Offline Data Accessibility: Applications are operable even when travelers don't have data accessibility.
User Experience: Travel applications will dwell on the smartphones like any other app, offering quick response times and the user won’t lose the benefits of native apps (i.e. the capacity to send contacts, presence on phone home display, etc)
Data Safety: PWAs link via HTTPS so there will not be any security or information privacy issues.
Maintenance: Each user will operate the most recent version of the app, so there are no maintenance issues. Better still the PWA will adapt to operate on tablets in addition to laptops and mobile.
Believe it or not, numerous surveys and studies have found that the development of travel applications can help the industry in overcoming following challenges:
- Acquiring new customers
- Increasing Engagement
- Improving traveler retention & loyalty
- More Direct Sales
- Building Brand Awareness
- Customer Support
- Disruption/IROPs
Conclusion
The technologies in the mobile travel space are undoubtedly evolving and growing at a much higher rate. And this brings a huge number of opportunities for numerous Mobile Application Development Company to build apps for brands that aim to engage with their customers throughout their travel lifecycle.
2019 is all set to bring an abundance of possibilities for travel app developers and travel brands to be ingenious and build apps that are capable of engaging with travelers in a manner that suits them the best. The consumers are looking for a more comfortable option to execute their travel plannings. Therefore, travel brands must enhance their customer experience by embracing the technologies that can be leveraged by the mobile platform.
Some of the major areas that will be tapped in 2019 by the travel application development companies are as follows:
- Voice technology
- Chatbots
- Auto Check-in
- Enhanced mobile payment platforms
- Business intelligence/analytics
Travel brands that continue to evolve with these advancements will grow and expand, while the others that don’t adopt the new trends would miss out on engaging their customers.