LateRooms.com has launched Mobile App Only Rates, giving users access to discounts of between 10 – 40% on publicly available deals.
The move by the UK’s leading hotel site is in response to increasingly spontaneous bookers looking for late hotel deals, and a growing propensity to make bookings from a mobile device.
The online hotel specialist has seen the proportion of traffic to its site via mobile devices increase by 25 percentage points since 2013, with over half of all visitors to the LateRooms.com site now coming via a mobile device. Traffic through its mobile app alone is currently more than 80% higher than in May 2013 as users’ search and purchasing habits in general continue to shift increasingly away from desktop.
LateRooms.com has also found that mobile bookers are increasingly spontaneous – 40% of rooms booked through its mobile app are for stays that same day, with almost 53% of bookings being for stays within the next 48 hours.
With more than 2,000 hotel partners already signed up to offer the Mobile App Only Rates, deals are becoming available across the UK, Europe, Asia Pacific and the Middle East. In the UK, customers can take advantage of offers in key cities like London, Manchester, Newcastle and Birmingham, as well as leisure destinations like the Lake District, Cotswolds and Cornwall.
Unlike competitor rate plans, LateRooms.com Mobile App Only Rates bring bespoke promotions from its hotel partners to individual consumers based upon both hotelier and consumer needs.
LateRooms.com Chief Operating Officer, Alistair Rodger, said: “We own the late hotels market for consumers, and our Mobile App Only Rates are allowing us to take this to the next level.
“A large proportion of our consumers are comfortable making late travel plans, and our hotel partners often have rooms available at short notice or quieter periods at particular times of the week or year. By marrying our mobile app, CRM system data, and hotels’ desire to promote specific offers to targeted segments, we’re bringing a new world of bespoke, personalised rates to the late consumer and providing our hotel partners with another, more sophisticated way of providing targeted deals.”
Richard Grosvenor, Head of Rooms Management for MacDonald Hotels & Resorts, said, “Since using the Mobile App Only Rates functionality, we’ve seen an encouraging growth in business as it allows us to incentivise bookings with discounts when we want or need them. They’re also giving our hotels great enhanced exposure on the LateRooms.com Mobile App’’.
Alistair Rodger adds, “There’s an element of urgency and spontaneity in mobile bookings and we want to encourage this ‘here and now’ attitude by giving customers exactly what they want – the right availability, the right price and the right hotel.”
The Mobile App Only rates functionality is one of the latest features introduced as part of LateRooms.com’s highly rated mobile app, which allows users to book a hotel in just 60 seconds.