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New Mobile Apps
The 900 lb gorilla-elephant hybrid in the room now is, of course, Vail Resorts’ EpixMix. A preview of the app set to dominate Front Range Colorado skiing can be seen here. Also, we found a couple other travelogue apps to compete with On The Road. Other apps of note:- Scavengr. A cool app that lets you create scavenger hunt games for your brand or destination.
- Layar: This has been around for a while for both iPhone and Android. We didn’t mention it last time because it is more of an information discovery app, not a content creation app. The potential here is to create your own branded Layar that your customers can use to interact with your brand.
App, Mobile Site or 3rd Party App?
The discussion begins as either “we should have a mobile app,” or “should we have a mobile app?” But it isn’t as simple as that. The options as we see them are threefold.Mobile Apps for Destinations
You have to think about how many of your customers have smartphones, what platform or platforms you want to develop on, how many of your customers would be inclined to actually download and use the app. This can vary widely from category to category and destination to destination. Also think about what the engagement points are and will they extend beyond the visit. When it comes to audience and engagement, more is more. Don’t settle for engaging an audience only while they’re at the destination, build an app that engages them in the time leading up to or away from a visit, or throughout the entire season.Mobile Sites For Destinations
Even media rich features can be included on mobile sites, and HTML5 has even more potential for engaging the phone’s full capabilities, so developing apps for multiple platforms might not be the way to go anymore. Mobile sites from the future will be able to access your phone’s gps, camera and memory to function a lot like a mobile app. As connectivity at winter resorts gets better, mobile sites will get a lot more valuable.Not My Mobile App
Don’t feel like reinventing the wheel and then convincing the world that it’s better? That’s sensible. There are a ton of mobile apps already out there that you can take advantage of for your destination without having to develop infrastructure, code or, most importantly, a user base. For these apps you just need to create a business account, claim or create your business profile(s) and monitor the community as it interacts. Many of these will allow a business to do more sophisticated things once an advertiser or sponsor relationship is engaged. The point here is that they have developed both the community and the platform for you to connect your business with an active and engaged community of people who might not be reached by either the mobile site or a mobile app you create.- Reviews and info:
- Yelp
- Travelocity
- Google Places
- Check-in and Games
- Foursquare
- Gowalla
- Scvngr
- Snow and Conditions
- REI
- North Face
- On The Snow
This season
We won’t try to prognosticate the future of mobile, at least not until we get invited on Good Morning America, but we will point out a few things you can infer about how the current state of mobile might play out for resorts and destinations this season.Facts:
- Smartphone sales are up. Nielsen and ChangeWave Research predict they’ll account half of all mobile devices by next year.
- Social Networking is the fastest growing mobile app category and has increased by 240% in the last year.
- The top 5 mobile Internet activities are
- Social Networking
- News & Current Events
- Search
- Portals