Mobile Marketing from Hotels' Point of View

Mobile Marketing from Hotels' Point of View

Introduction

The paper conducts a cross analysis of the mobile marketing use in hotels keeping inv view the interviews carried out with the hotels. The analyses are based on data from hotels which do not use mobile marketing, and the questionnaire is attached to email it is called “Interview Guide for hotels which do not use Mobile marketing”. The second is the interview data which is obtained from hotels which currently use mobile marketing in their operations, and the questionnaire used during interviews for this type of hotels is in “Interview guide for the hotels which use Mobile marketing”. The purpose is to validate the research questions that related to either mobile marketing is applicable to the industry, are there sufficient benefits of mobile marketing, and are there any issues that hotels try to avoid wh8ile implementing mobile marketing.

The number of "mobile users" increases without stops around the world. The hotel industry gets directly impacted by the use of these new technologies with applications to better fit in a better way of life through mobile. One can define mobile marketing as an activity dedicated to the design, implementation and execution of marketing activities conducted through mobile devices. Mobile devices are small digital media, easy to use and management, enabling their transfer to any place without difficulty, and whose consumption is without electrical connection. Among these, the most important are mobile Phones, PDA (Personal Digital Assistant), ipod, Handhelds, GPS, etc (Schulze, 1999).

In short, a mobile marketing action consists in sending a "message" (or "content") to the mobile device of a receiver, through a distribution system. If the message contains information, the companies have a case of mobile marketing. However, if the distribution system gets used to send the message is the Bluetooth technology, this would be a case of proximity marketing.

The companies now prefer mobile device to convey a message, either advertising or informative, for its wide penetration rate, is by far the mobile phone in front of the other devices. There is no single standard, but instead the companies including the hotels found a hefty variety of mobile phone models, differentiating them from each other by independent variables, as its functionality (connectivity, camera, GPS), interface (touch screens, QWERTY keyboards, keypads, joystick), operating system (Symbian, Windows Mobile, Android, etc.). The contents, e.g. mobile applications can be delivered to mobile phones primarily through SMS messaging, Internet and Bluetooth systems, actually. Several examples of mobile marketing are (Schneider, 2001):

A city council wants to promote their town or village at a fair or just those visitors have all the information about the town on your mobile. This company hires as Mobimento, who develops a mobile tourist guide with content in the area including the attractions, services available, monuments, museums, entertainment, accommodations, restaurants, map of the location, timing events and parties, etc. Once the application to send the application to mobile visitors or citizens, placed through Bluetooth devices (Proximity Marketing) at the tourist ...