Hotels.com Facebook App Encourages Collaborative Bookings With Friends

We’re seeing more and more brands recognising the potential of doing business through Facebook – incorporating social elements and having friends browse and recommend items is a powerful tool for marketers to have when they’re enticing new customers. But creating an app that encourages friends to join in isn’t the easiest task, as not everyone wants to disclose what they want to buy.

However, this gives the travel and tourism industries an opportunity to capitalise upon, as holidays are normally regarded as a social activity, usually travelling with a group of friends or loved ones. One new example is Hotels.com who recently launched a Facebook app called Hotels WithMe, allowing users to book hotels directly from the social media site. The site boasts over 140,000 different hotels in its portfolio as well as over 2.5 million customer reviews on its main site.

On the surface, there’s nothing revolutionary to this as many brand pages offer such functionality when they’re dabbling with Facebook commerce. The real pull of this app in particular is that you can invite your friends or collectively browse and book a hotel from the site. So instead of browsing by yourself trying to please a group, you can have everyone actively involved in the search and can come to a consensus. It also means that the page gains more users for the app as well as it’ll lead to your friends inviting their friends if they find it useful and increasing the app’s reach.

The page doesn’t require you to like the page to access the app which is a good move as it increases its accessibility, which in turn increases its reach. Currently the U.K. Facebook page has 18,503 fans, but since this is separate to the page itself, its difficult to tell just how successful this app has been so far.

Another important point to note is that the page does offer a special benefit to those who like the page in the form of a 10 per cent off voucher. That mightn’t be a huge deal but it does give people an incentive to become fans of the page, important if you’re trying to bump up the number of people who have access to your page, as many brands opt for the ‘like first, access later’ school of thought.