Online travel supplier Travelta, based in the Netherlands, today announced their location-based hotel finder for mobile phones and PDAs at www.travelta.mobi, which allows users to find and book a hotel at their current position.

www.travelta.mobi, which uses location based services to determine the location of the user, lists hotels based on distance from the user and features up-to-date information on room availability and room rates. Next to that, users are informed about availability of specific room types, check-in and check-out times, what the rooms look like and the star classification.

After users have selected their preferred hotel, a toll-free phonenumber is quoted to finalize the booking. As of this moment it is however not possible to finalize the reservation of the booking online, which we see as a missed opportunity for Travelta.

On marketingfacts.nl Travelta’s e-commerce manager Erwin Herbert comments on missing the option to make an online reservation; ‘If you are on the move it is not convenient to make your reservation online, because you will really need a computer or laptop to book online. Using mobile phones or pda’s is just not convenient enough; you will have to enter your credit card number and fill out a lot of forms. Using this phonenumber, reservations are much more efficient and thus better suits demands and wishes of our users.’

Travelta is using a traditional merchant model, earning commision for leads genereated through the mobile service. Due to partnerships with large partners such as booking.com and hotels.com the mobile service can search up to 80.000 hotels already.

The location based services and hotel availability can be used on any Windows Mobile or Android based mobile device. In addition to the automatic geographical location, manual search can also be used on all other mobile platforms such as Symbian (Nokia) and BlackBerry. Using the manual search for locations (run on a Symbian device) appears to working as intended, and can be characterised as self-explaining and easy to use.

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