“However, travel companies must now look beyond the Internet to attain further benefits in streamlined operations and improved customer service.
Mobile technology offers significant additional opportunities to improve communication and increase customer loyalty. For example, airlines can notify passengers via SMS of cancellations and delays, itinerary changes and updates. Mobiles also have the potential to hold boarding passes, baggage tracking information and payment data making travel truly paperless and location independent.
There is also the future possibility that the mobile could be used to store visa and biometric information. What’s more, improvements in network speeds and the advent of 3.5G and 4G will make accessing and distributing this information instantly from the mobile device a reality.
As the travel industry faces its toughest financial challenge in decades, those organisations that embrace mobile technology will be best placed to improve brand interaction, drive down customer service costs and fundamentally improve the entire travel process from booking to arrival and beyond.”