Sol Meliá launches Mobile Booking Services

Spain’s Sol Meliá group has, in conjunction with Dublin-based specialist Mobile Travel Technologies Ltd (MTT) launched mobile services worldwide. The new service offers full booking capability, giving travellers the convenience to select and book a hotel, access bookings and view hotel information whilst away from their PC. All services are currently available in Spanish and English.

In developing this solution, Sol Meliá is responding to the explosive growth in demand for mobile travel services, particularly amongst business travellers, driven in part by the growth in easy-to-use smartphone devices.

Whilst Mobile travel services powered by MTT saw considerable growth throughout 2009, this was most marked at the end of the year, when some of MTT’s customers saw mobile traffic and bookings grow by as much as 50% month-on-month between November and December.

Now, a Sol Meliá custome can locate Sol Meliá hotels in a particular area, book a room after checking hotel facilities and images, then locate the hotel via a link to Google maps. In addition, Sol Meliá mas Rewards Programme members can access their points summary.

“These new mobile services create an additional distribution channel for Sol Meliá and bring increased convenience to our customers as they transact and access bookings via their mobile devices,” said David Wright, VP Hotel Distribution, Sol Meliá. “As a global hotel chain, it was important these services were accessible worldwide, and MTT’s mobile platform provided a tried and tested solution.”

Mobile services developed for Sol Meliá Mobile use MTT’s intelligent mobile hotel platform, m2bed, to fulfil the hotel chain’s requirements, automatically directing customers to a view of the site relevant to their country and optimised for their particular device. The site has been developed with a usability focused User Interface, with minimised clicking, typing and scrolling required. Travellers can quickly locate a particular hotel, find directions or check hotel facilities, by drilling down from an initial country listing. For each hotel, users can scroll through hotel images, find details of hotel amenities, and locate hotels on a map, generated via a link to Google Maps.

Customers in Spain can ‘click to call’ the Sol Meliá call centre at any point, with customers in other geographic locations directed to a full list of reservations centres by country. Links are also provided within the site to Sol Meliá corporate information.

Gerry Samuels, Founder and Executive Director, MTT, said, “As we enter a year of anticipated rapid growth in demand for mobile travel services, Sol Meliá Mobile is going to be a very important service for Sol Meliá customers in Spain and worldwide, providing enhanced convenience to business travellers.”

To view the Sol Meliá mobile site, enter solmelia.com into your mobile device’s browser.

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