When making accommodation reservations within 48 hours, travelers don’t need to sacrifice quality, breadth of choice, or satisfaction for spontaneity. Booking.com today announced the launch of Booking Now, a new mobile app that provides a personalized booking experience tailored to individual customer preferences and location. By harnessing the power of data based on user behavior as well as GPS technology, the Booking Now app showcases more than 580,000 properties worldwide to provide custom accommodation recommendations for spontaneous travelers.
The launch of Booking Now supports the growing importance of mobile when it comes to booking accommodations within 48 hours. According to Booking.com data, worldwide almost half of reservations made within 48 hours are booked on a mobile device.
“With the launch of Booking Now, we’re increasing our investment in mobile by leveraging our global scale, assets, and partnerships to accommodate the growing number of customers who are booking reservations within two days or less of their stay,” said Darren Huston, chief executive officer of Booking.com. “The new app puts users at the center of the booking experience, drawing from our vast database of properties to meet their specific preferences at the very moment they need to book. Booking Now is designed to deliver a seamless mobile experience for spontaneous consumers, fitting perfectly into their multi-device, on-demand lifestyle.”
Booking Now personalizes real-time search results based on the unique traveler profile created by each first-time user to indicate specific accommodation preferences, such as desired price range and options like parking, breakfast, and Wi-Fi. Users are then presented with the most relevant available accommodation suggestions based on their profile and within their defined location. Users can quickly and easily browse through the recommended options with a single swipe of their finger and book their preferred accommodation in just two taps. With Booking Now’s predictive analytics, the more frequently customers use the app, the more personalized their recommended matches become. Additionally, as users swipe through the app, they can pin their top hotel choice to the map to create a short, visual list for quick and easy reference.
Further customizing the experience, Booking Now results can also be based on the user’s current street-level location anywhere in the world. The app’s GPS technology then provides step-by-step directions from the current location directly to the user’s accommodation of choice.
Booking Now is designed to sit alongside the existing Booking.com mobile application. It’s now available for download in the United States in Apple’s App Store, with a continued global roll out in the following weeks.
