How To Develop An Amazing Hotel Mobile App?
So you are all set to take a leap forward and develop a hotel mobile app for your hospitality brand or group in order to take advantage of the many benefits of mobile guest engagement. So what should be your next step? The next step is to figure out the way to develop the best hotel app not only for your organization but for your guests as well. Here are a few tips that will help you to create an awesome mobile app for a hotel or hospitality business.
1. Join Hands With A Right App Development Agency
It’s really critical to identify an appropriate app development agency which can cater to your development needs. This is a very crucial decision and thus must be executed with utter caution. Most hoteliers are not app developers and have limited knowledge of the requirements. Therefore, it’s important to surround yourself with experts who know what they’re doing, and who have hopefully gone through the steps before. There is a huge difference between developing a mobile app for the hospitality sector as compared to creating an app for any other industry. Find a third-party hotel app developer that can address your specific needs and answer your questions to boost your confidence.
2. Gather And Use Inputs From Multiple Departments
All the players need to contribute in order to make a team successful. Every department needs to contribute: Sales & Marketing, Hotel IT, Operations, etc. The best hotel apps serve multiple purposes for every aspect of a hospitality business. You aren’t investing money in your app to end up with something that will just sit in the app stores with your logo on it. Set meetings with department heads to discuss the app development.
Collect feedback, set goals and define roles. Who will be responsible for managing what aspects of the development process? Discuss and get answers for questions like who will gather all of the images necessary? Who will upload digital menu content? Who will proofread the copy? Everything must be fully organized in order to ensure maximum engagement with all members of hotel management and staff.
3. Keep A Margin To Grow
When you have a thought of launching your mobile app, you tend to read a lot about the same. You would learn about all the latest features of mobile apps and will dream to utilize it in your app as well. But you need to think logically about the scope of the project. Outline your immediate needs, your overall timeline, and your available resources. Talk about your requirements and get the feedback from the development agency.
Certain hotel app features take a lot more time to develop than you would expect. Features such as hotel mobile key to allow guests to use smartphones to open hotel room doors can be time-consuming because of the necessity to coordinate activity between multiple third-party hospitality technology vendors.
Understand the fact that you will not be able to launch your app with all the features that you wish. However, you’ll be able to scale up as time goes on. It’s best in your interest that you keep a scope of growth. You want an app that you can update and expand in the future as you come to learn and understand mobile technology for hotels more completely.
4. Think About Revenue
Mobile hotel apps can be a great source of additional revenue. Generating revenue through hotel technology is of great interest to most hoteliers, and it’s obvious you’d like to think you’ll be able to generate ROI from a hotel app.
But how do you generate revenue through a hotel app?
There are numerous ways actually, and you have to decide which is best for your hospitality business. Here are a few of them:
- Hotel reservation booking
- Direct marketing and advertising via mobile
- Allowing mobile in-room dining orders
- Enabling reservation booking at spas and restaurants
If you are looking to get an app for your hotel/ restaurant or any hospitality venture, get in touch with us. Our industry experts will love to know your requirements and will shape up the best app for you.