While many travel and tourism companies jump on the app wagon, the team behind the popular Las Vegas guide and booking site Vegas.com has decided to focus on a well-designed, easy-to-navigate mobile site instead.
Most hotels in Las Vegas have created smartphone apps, and there are dozens of guides available to download that emphasize nightlife, dining, attractions, walking tours and more. Instead of adding more static to the noise, the Vegas.com team focused on what made most sense for its users.
“[We] analyzed a lot of data while forming a strategy for the mobile space,” said Dan Hippler, vice president of marketing for Vegas.com. “What we found is that since we are a single destination offering, customers needed us for a window of time while planning a trip or once [they have arrived] in the market. With the large amount of time between trips, an app wouldn’t have been utilized and therefore likely deleted.”
The mobile site (m.vegas.com) features information in six areas: hotel rooms, show tickets, deals, flight and hotel packages, tours and nightclubs. All of these features enable users to easily book and buy tickets, tours and packages on the go during a trip to Las Vegas. A seventh feature enables users to browse same-day discounts, a feature Hippler said was added because more than 60% of visitors to the site were booking products and services for use in the next few days.
Though the Vegas.com mobile site is simple to access and use, it assumes visitors already know what they want to see and do. Summaries, reviews and ratings, arguably some of the best content on the website, are buried beneath the commerce-driven features. Nonetheless, those who are interested in booking various components of their Las Vegas vacation are likely to find the site convenient and helpful. They would be wise to create an account from a desktop computer before leaving in order to ease the purchase experience upon arrival in the city. And, if travelers have any snafus with the process, there is a toll-free number that appears throughout the site for immediate phone contact to Vegas.com.
“(Our agents) are the most highly trained Vegas experts out there, and since waiting on hold with a mobile phone is never fun, the line will ring right through to one of them,” Hippler said.