MobileBeat 2015: The move to the cross-device experience
0Speaker: David Doctorow (Expedia)
Moderator: Matt Marshall (VentureBeat)
Like many large e-commerce companies over past 18 months, Expedia has undergone a major shift. The company’s race for app downloads is over. It no longer focuses its media spend to drive users to the app. Instead, it’s all about cross-device experience, and serving customers wherever they are. In Expedia’s case, the travel company originally built its app to let customers book a hotel within the next 24 hours. The belief was that if a customer uses an app, it was to make quick or spontaneous bookings. But more recently, its widened its ambitions, and wants to serve the customer in any number of ways on the phone, with the assumption that customers continue their travel research and ticket-buying across their phone, tablet and desktop. Expedia stresses the mobile experience, includes messaging customers in-trip, about things like flight delays or gate changes. Expedia’s customers perform on average 48 different searches before they book a flight. That means they do this across different devices, so a cross-device shopping experience is essential to get right in 2015.