Sprice.com goes Mobile
Sprice.com
In my previous article “Mobile commerce is reshaping the way consumers plan, book and consume travel” about mobile apps re-shaping the way consumers plan and book travel and how most of the current apps are US-centric. Well, Sprice.com has just join the foray of travel service providers with their iPhone apps – “Sprice Hotels” – which is now available in the iPhone Apps store.
According to Vikas Gulati, vice president of Sprice.com Asia Pacific – “The launch of our mobile application Sprice Hotels is a natural progression for our travel search engine as the pool of mobile users around the world to expand exponentially.” (Click here to see the full Article). It is definitely nice to see travel players in Asia Pacific starting to explore mobile application and generate income from the new mobile channel and I definitely look forward for more of such apps.
Excited, I picked up my iPhone immediately and fire up the App store to download Sprice Hotels to have a first hand experience of the App. First impression of the application is that the icon is a striking resemblance of the Hotels.com iPhone App – with a huge “H” representing Hotels. The app also assumes that I want to book Singapore hotel (leveraging on iPhone location services) – which I am not. Why do service provider assumes that I want last minute hotels in the location where I am at. There is a tab at the bottom of the screen to search hotel by destinations (which i tried). There seems to be no way where i can select my check-in/out date for the destination where i am going. The application automatically select a default date to return a search results. If I like a particular hotel offer, i can then click on it to select the check-in/out date to check availability for that hotel from a few of Sprice.com’s partners. Overall (in my opinion), a very clumsy experience when compared to other comparison search engine iPhone apps like Kayak.com. I would rate the application 2.5 out of 5 – Encouraging effort nevertheless. Certainly hope that Sprice.com would learn from initial experience and improve the service further to include flight search, store flight itinerary, etc (similar to WorldMate iPhone App).
Anyone tried to book their hotel using Sprice Hotels yet? Would certainly like your comments on that.
