NEW YORK—The online distribution space is one of the hottest areas of hospitality right now, with everyone looking to get a larger piece of the pie. And as more and more guests depend on mobile for their needs, companies have to find a way to compete in that space. And that means apps. Button—a contextual commerce marketplace that powers connections into the mobile app economy—recently partnered with Hotels.com to drive app installs and bookings in mobile.
How does it work? Button connects the Hotels.com app to millions of new users globally and re-engages existing customers across its marketplace of publishers. “We’re trying to create an environment where we can try to predict what consumer intent is at any given moment within the mobile world, and where that intent materializes, do our best to match that intent with whatever company or service or product can fulfill it best,” said Michael Jaconi, founder and CEO of Button.
So, for instance, say a user is reading about London travel in the fall in a travel review app. The app would have a button for Hotels.com that would take the user directly into Hotels.com’s app to book a trip. Or the button might appear in apps that book flights, so the user can then book a room for the night.
“If you think about the world we live in now with mobile, you have this very app-driven and siloed experience where as we’re researching something, we’re inside of one experience—whether that’s a review site, content publication or a magazine that has been translated to mobile. In any of those experiences, if you have intent to go visit the location you’ve been studying, you don’t have a great way to connect and actually complete the transaction or book your stay,” said Jaconi.
This historically has been done through mobile web, but Jaconi noted that there are many pain points for consumers associated with mobile web, where login, preferences and payment information is not automatically known the way it is inside a mobile app. “That’s why mobile web has suffered so greatly and why every retailer has invested in building their own application,” said Jaconi.
That is also shown in the data. “When you look at any app that sells something, at the conversion rates they drive inside of their mobile apps vs. the traffic they drive inside of the mobile web, the conversion rates are typically 400% to 500% better than mobile web when you drive traffic into your app,” he said.
Jaconi said the partnership was beneficial to all. Consumers get a more efficient and informative app experience, while partners in the marketplace such as Hotels.com get access to new users. And the publishers, “which can be anybody—a magazine, a travel review app, any type of mobile site or app that is trying to create a connection to a consumer—tap into a revenue stream that’s been proven throughout every cycle in the digital or physical economy: If someone drives traffic from one place and it results in a transaction in another place, the source of that traffic ultimately, is paid a revenue share. We help facilitate that affiliate model in mobile,” he said.
“The other cool part is by building and integrating with Hotels.com. Now if they want to launch a new partnership, they don’t have to do any work,” Jaconi continued. “Once they become part of Button’s platform, they can facilitate these partnerships without having to lift a finger. They want to be able to scale these partnerships and what we’ve recognized is most companies don’t have an abundance of mobile engineers or resources so to do even one partnership is really tough. Integrate with us and we’ll spread you across all the partners who work with us and any new partners you want to bring to us—that reduction in resource allocation for both sides of the marketplace has been one of the greatest ingredients to our success.”
Speaking to broader trends in hospitality, Jaconi noted that Hotels.com may be the first big platform to engage in this space, but it won’t be the only platform to look at solutions like this. “There’s a core component in our offering: Not only do we provide them a pathway to drive app installs and transactions within their apps, but we also give them a bunch of deep linking capabilities so that when they are driving consumers into their app, they can drive a higher conversion flow by linking it to specific places within their app,” he said.
“The reality is there’s this moving or growing trend; mobile commerce is going to be bigger, frankly, than any other trend we’ve seen in digital,” said Jaconi. “If you think about the impact and the size of the market, mobile will touch more consumers than PCs ever did. This is going to be the portal by which people use or ultimately transact through. You combine that with the fact that all these categories now are moving to mobile, some that didn’t even make it to the web, like daily transactions, and you look at all of that, this is going to be far bigger than anything we’ve seen.”