Rob Define, eBookers.com

People are already booking big ticket items on the mobile phone, such as holiday packages, for example. Consider that 60 per cent of hotel bookings made via the mobile are made one day or less in advance. While 40 per cent of air travel booked via mobile is a one day trip or one way flight which is significantly higher than on the PC platform. You can see that we are meeting a whole new set of needs.

Around 96 per cent of our mobile business comes from Android and Apple, but our mobile web site brings in more business than apps. A sister company of ours in the US called Orbit launched both a website and an app but saw the majority of traffic come from mobile web.

So there are two sides to our strategy—transactional and branding—and you do need to have both mobile web and apps. The website m.ebookers.com launched in January 2011 along with a mobile transactional app which is the same product as we had on the desktop with a similar experience. We then launched an Ebookers Explorer iPad app in April, to create a travel magazine for our customers which integrates with a hotels API and builds brand awareness and inspiration.

Organic search and paid search are the biggest drivers to a site but you need two different advertising strategies for PC and mobile. With the PC you can get a decent CTR but with mobile if you’re ranked third you’re bottom of the pile. So you have to have a completely different bidding strategy for buying mobile ads versus the PC.

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