The world’s first brand focused mobile solution delivers guest engagement levels up to 80 % as well as deep business intelligence, using the power of mobile to direct customers away from online booking platforms and back to hotel operators.
Go Find It Technologies, a pioneering provider of mobile solutions and applications for the hospitality industry, and Emaar Hospitality Group in Dubai, UAE, has launched “Mobile First”, a new digital solution, which revolutionizes both the role and impact of digital strategies in the hospitality industry.
“Mobile First” consists of individual brand apps that offer the complete guest experience in all Emaar Hospitality Group properties, whilst integrated into a larger, dedicated brand application. Each app connects users with all the activities available at Emaar Hospitality Group’s hotels as well as in the city of Dubai.
“In recent years, the hospitality industry has lost significant ground to players like Booking.com, Expedia and TripAdvisor which now have a market cap of 111 billion USD,” explains Thomas Martensson, CEO of Go Find It. “This is more than many of the world’s major hotel groups value combined. Digital transformation should be the single most important objective for all hotel group owners and managers.”
Chris Newman, Chief Operating Officer of Emaar Hospitality Group says, "When every single hotel group is working on a digital transformation solution, we are especially proud that Emaar Hospitality Group is the first to bring this to market. The solution that Go Find It and the Emaar Hospitality Group team have delivered and the new ideas incorporated are paving the way for continued growth and success in our business.”
80% penetration and engagement
The application was first launched for upscale boutique hotel Vida Downtown Dubai in 2015 and quickly became one of the most downloaded hotel applications in the Middle East.
Concurrently, Go Find It and Emaar Hospitality Group worked together to deliver a broader platform featuring a fully connected and integrated mobile solution across all five hotel brands. Each individual hotel application offers exclusive content and engages guests with a tone of voice suitable for the brand. It supports full connectivity not only with the hotel’s booking engines for rooms and restaurants, but also the PMS/POS and the U by Emaar loyalty program.
Go Find It is aiming at over 80 per cent penetration and engagement for each app, a level they have been able to deliver for other hotel properties.
“This means that 80 out of each 100 guests will be using the apps, in contrast if you were to look at the top 10 hotel groups in the world and their digital strategies the results are poor, some as low as 4 out of every 100 guests engage on average. This presents dangers as any brand must engage in the mobile context to attract business and create loyalty,” continued Thomas Martensson.
“The opportunity lies in the fact that if the top ten hotel groups could manage to engage more of the 800 million guests they have annually then they could achieve a market cap of more than the same group’s stock value today. Mobile is the way to make this happen, but for that you need to achieve engagement – hotels need to go from the current level as low as 4% to a minimum 50% engagement - which can be done.”
Bottom up Strategy
Building an app from the bottom up is not the usual method and is unique to Go Find It and Emaar’s approach. Instead of a single group application, which hosts all brands in one (sometimes up to 20 different brands), Emaar pursued an app that was bespoke to each of their brands and properties.
“With the switch from desktop to mobile, hoteliers have a new opportunity to engage guests. We are delighted that Emaar Hospitality Group has chosen to work with us in a bold move that challenges the norms in what we believe will be a game changing strategy”.
A Business Intelligence to better understand guest preferences
The “Mobile First” solution integrates a Business Intelligence internal app that enables the leadership team to access real-time performance data of all guests via a custom dashboard application. “Being able to track real-time data and user behavior is one of the key selling points of this new solution,” adds Martensson.
The Business Intelligence tool tracks all user behavior recorded by the guest-facing app, from buying patterns to engagement and advanced user behavior, to allow clients to fully understand their guests’ needs, as well as drill down into different demographics in a way that was not previously possible.