It’s been a while since my last contribution to the site which seems to be going from strength to strength lately, Tnooz. Today I’ve rectified the situation with a piece exploring a topic I’ve mentioned before on this blog, at my recent Eye for Travel conference presentation, and in countless meetings with airline executives. Click here to read the article in full. The question I’m asking in that piece is how should airlines assess the relative importance of investment in mobile apps versus the browser based mobile web?
In the Tnooz article I’ve relied heavily on a recent comScore report on mobile, but there were two things in that report that I found interesting and which didn’t really fit the theme of apps vs mobile web.
The first was this sentence from the report: In December 2010, 9.8 million mobile phone users in Japan made a purchase using their mobile wallet, accounting for nearly 10 percent of mobile subscribers. That number is impressive – mobile payments certainly look like an interesting area going forward if other markets follow the lead of Japan, as I expect they will.
The second interesting thing I saw was the chart below. Did I hear someone use the term f-commerce?
March 3, 2011 at 5:08 am
F-commerce will definitely be a buzzword this year, especially now that Facebook announced its new policy to force the use of FB Credits upon all game-apps.
FB Credits has not yet taken off, so I believe this is the first step of Facebook’s plan to establish this tool as a payment gateway for the f-commerce.
By the way, does anyone see the parallel with iTunes store and the new publishing policies?
With more specific regards to this article’s main topic, I think that Facebook’s unified payment strategy may increase travel spending via it’s mobile platform by increasing user confidence and experience continuum. However, it will take some time before airlines/hotels negotiate reasonable commissions and travellers get educated to spend hundreds of dollars through a “social networking site”.
The question is: how much time?
March 3, 2011 at 8:05 pm
Delta have had a Facebook IBE for a while and Malaysian recently launched one. There will be a lot of experimentation before real business models in travel via Facebook see serious volumes (as in transactional models rather than pure marketing) but I’m becoming more convinced it will happen.