INTERNATIONAL REPORT—During a recent budget meeting at a mid-sized hotel company, Max Starkov of Hospitality eBusiness Strategies was called upon by a desperate IT director who was trying to push through a mobile platform line item.

The company’s CEO wasn’t convinced he should spend precious resources creating a custom Web site that users would access through their mobile devices—that is until Starkov asked the CEO to pull out his own BlackBerry.

Max Starkov of Hospitality eBusiness Strategies discussed the importance of mobile platforms during EHTEC.

The CEO thumbed at his mobile device for a while and then huffed in frustration.

“What do you think of your site?” Starkov asked.

“I think it sucks,” the CEO replied.

That CEO wasn’t alone in his revelation. As smartphone devices such as the iPhone, BlackBerry and Droid penetrate the traveling masses at an exponential rate, hoteliers are quickly learning their existing Web sites are poorly suited for mobile technology.

“You can’t literally translate the conventional Web site for the wireless world,” Starkov said during the European Hospitality Technology Educational Conference held last month. “There are many limitations, primarily (which) come from usability and the inability to organize huge amounts of content on your mobile Web.”

Hyatt Hotels Corporation’s Web site, for example, contains more than 3,500 pages. Navigating through such a deep pool of information using a responsive mouse and a full-sized computer screen is one thing, but doing so using a tiny scroll wheel on a screen that’s only three inches wide is as tedious as it is time-consuming, Starkov said.

Fortunately for smartphone-carrying Hyatt Gold Passport members, the company developed an intuitive mobile platform that compiles the most pertinent information into 37 pages. 

Keep it simple

Offering only the most important information is the biggest key of developing any mobile platform, said Henry Harteveldt, VP and principal analyst of airline and travel research for Forrester Research.

Henry Harteveldt VP and principal analyst Forrester Research

The way you present that information is as equally important, Harteveldt added. Get rid of unnecessary graphics and images. Don’t pack too much information into a screen display.

“It requires a lot of discipline in terms of the design process,” he said.

Remember that typing matters—anyone who’s tried to hammer out an e-mail with their thumbs using either a touch-screen or full keyboard can attest to this. The fact wasn’t lost on the IT team at Shangri-La Hotels and Resorts. Before developing their own mobile platform, the team determined that competitors’ mobile sites required way too much typing.

“On our site, we tried to minimize the need for users to type to find a hotel,” said Michael Leong, the company’s director of corporate e-business. “Of course, you can’t avoid it completely, because you need to type your name, but it’s something we tried to avoid as much as possible when designing our site.”

Another tech consideration is device differences. Some phones might support certain Web technologies like Java, while others might not. Leong advised using a middle-of-the-road approach that works on as many devices as possible.

In many cases, differences in regional mobile networks make that an impossible task, and separate platforms have to be developed. In Japan, for example, Shangri-La had to design an entirely new site to optimize the advanced capabilities of the Japanese mobile network and phones.

Regardless of network capabilities, platform developers always should take into account differences between one country’s or culture’s travelers and another’s, Harteveldt said.