"Booking Now”: the launch of a new mobile application for last-minute bookings

Booking is known to be one of the leading online travel agencies. The accommodation website has in fact become a reference with its large hotel inventory, 590,000 worldwide, its best room fares and its serious customers reviews (more than 40 million verified guest reviews).  

With mobile becoming the new digital standard and last-minute bookings getting more and more used by travelers, the company decided lately to invest in a mobile application to keep a sustainable growth. In fact, according to Booking: “half of all reservations made 48 hours in advance are booked from a mobile device”. But instead of making a fade copy of their website into an application, Booking tried to go further. The company answered the customer need of last-minute deals around customers’ location launching the application “Booking Now” last week (only available in the United States for now).

“Booking Now” is a mobile application that enable travelers to book a room nearby where they are.

Taking also into account the customer need of customization, “Booking Now” let the user create its profile and give him hotel choices according to his tastes (breakfast included, Wi-Fi, etc.) and its location thanks to GPS feature.

The customer experience will be consequently improved thanks to this seamless mobile application. Setting unique user profiles and including geolocation and mapping features for accurate and personalized last-minute offers and step-by-step directions, it seems that Booking is succeeding to give a tailored services to its customers.

Moreover, with this application, the company chose directly to compete with the famous “Hotel Tonight” application. Indeed, “Hotel Tonight” initiated the same-day booking concept and till now no application had been able to compete with them. Now that “Booking Now” is live, delivers a larger hotel inventory and is starting to be well communicated, will this pole position change? Will Booking win an even larger market share thanks to this app?

Let us know what you think!

Clémence Fernet & Tiphaine Leblanc

All rights reserved to Booking.com for pictures

Sources :

http://skift.com/2015/01/20/skift-business-traveler-the-growth-of-last-minute-hotel-bookings/

http://www.breakingtravelnews.com/news/article/booking.coms-new-mobile-app-features-last-minute-booking/

http://www.breakingtravelnews.com/news/article/booking.com-unveils-mobile-app-for-booking/