by Tracey Gudwin
BERLIN, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Next time you plan to reserve a hotel room or book a flight ticket, try doing it on your smartphone, as a new trend in online tourism marketing is taking place.
The trend is called mobile travel services and its innovator is none other than the hugely successful Apple iPhone, which hit the market in January 2007. Smartphones like the iPhone, Google Android, Nokia, Blackberry and Palm models have created a whole new market of mobile consumerism through cell phone applications.
About 25 percent of all smartphone users already reserve hotels, buy movie tickets and shop for travel needs online, according to statistics from Sempora Consulting in Germany.
At the Mobile Travel Services Program this week at the the ITB Berlin, the world's biggest travel fair, Dr. Hagen J. Sexauer from Sempora Consulting spoke about the need to reach consumers through mobile applications.
"Today, over 100 million people use their credit card through iphone applications. Store owners will need to develop mobile applications to capture that market share," Sexauer said.
He said that as the world comes out of last year's economic crisis, "mobile applications will influence the behavior of consumer services and buying power."
Adaptation to new market needs was an important theme throughout this year's ITB as global tourism fell 4 percent in 2009 according to ITB statistics.
Christian Riesenberger, director of business development at HRS, a German company that offers a global electronic hotel reservation system for business and private travelers, explained the necessity for the mobile travel services trend.
"In the past, the customer mainly called the hotel or travel agency. Now you can sit in the hotel while checking out the environment and make the booking for the same price as on the Internet," Riesenberger said.
The ever-growing Chinese outbound tourism market has draw the attention of many tourism professionals at the international travel fair.
Sexauer said that he believed that China would catch up with Japan in terms of the number of mobile application users in the future. Japan now has the most users of mobile applications that stand at 91 million, compared with Germany's 18 million mobile application-savvy users.
"There are 390 million online Chinese Internet users, more than in the United States," said Jens Thraenhart, founder of ChinaTravelTrends.com., a platform for China outbound tourism in Berlin.
"People are going to have to tap into the Chinese social media landscape," Thraenhart said.
