Shangri-La Hotels & Resorts has developed a mobile website to make online bookings easier for smartphone users.
Available in English, simplified Chinese and Japanese, the website is designed especially for smartphones such as iPhone, Blackberry, HTC and Nokia Nseries.
Shangri-La Hotels & Resorts director of corporate e-business Michael Leong said that the website had been launched to “take care of this fast-growing group of users”.
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“This phenomenon is illustrated in the recent Mobile Internet Report released by Morgan Stanley in December 2009, which stated that mobile internet today is growing at a much faster pace than Desktop Internet (PCs+notebooks+netbooks) and that smartphones will out-ship the global desktop internet market by 2012,” said Leong.
He explained that the three main differences between the mobile website and Shangri-La’s original website were screen size, content and usability.
“The Shangri-La mobile website is specially suited to the smaller screen sizes of smartphones, while the original Shangri-La website is more suitable for the larger screen size of a PC or notebook computer,” said Leong.
”Since the typical smartphone screen size is much smaller than a regular computer, we have made sure that the content on our mobile website is more condensed and concise compared to the regular website. This is so that mobile users can quickly get the information that they need, without having to scroll through pages of text and pictures,” he continued.
In terms of usability, Leong said that without a keyboard and mouse, browsing a website on a smartphone is usually more challenging to navigate than a computer.
“This is especially so when you try to fill up an online form using a virtual keyboard like in an iPhone,” said Loeng. “That’s why we have designed our mobile website to address these challenges by having clearer navigation links and buttons and more importantly, unlike other hotel companies' mobile websites, we have eliminated the need for typing when searching for our hotels.”
The website was developed entirely in-house and is designed ot help gorw online bookings – which already stand at amlomst 14% of all business.
”As we have only recently launched this mobile website, we do not have any figures on the number of bookings from this mobile website. However, it was encouraging to see some guests booking through this mobile website within the first few days of its launch,” said Leong.
He added that offering the mobile website in just three laguages was “a question of balancing market need and ROI”.
“We feel that these three languages are sufficient to cover most of our consumers’ needs today. We will, however, continue to evaluate this on a regular basis to see if more language options could be added as our customer base increase worldwide annually,” said Leong.
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