Sol Melia, Spain’s leading hotel chain and the world's leading hotel chain for holidays, has launched mobile services worldwide, in conjunction with Dublin-based specialist Mobile Travel Technologies Ltd (MTT). This innovation, a first for a Spanish hotel chain, offers full booking capability, giving travellers the convenience to select and book a hotel, access bookings and view hotel information whilst away from their PC. All services are available in Spanish and English.

In developing this solution, Sol Melia is responding to the explosive growth in demand for mobile travel services, particularly amongst business travellers, driven in part by the growth in easy-to-use smartphone devices?.

Whilst Mobile travel services powered by MTT saw considerable growth throughout 2009, this was most marked at the end of the year, when some of MTT’s customers saw mobile traffic and bookings grow by as much as 50% month-on-month between November and December.

Now, a Sol Melia customer, needing to stop over after a late-running business meeting, can locate Sol Melia hotels in the vicinity, book a room after checking hotel facilities and images, then locate the hotel via a link to Google maps. In addition, Sol Melia mas Rewards Programme members can access their points summary.

“These new mobile services create an additional distribution channel for Sol Melia and bring increased convenience to our customers as they transact and access bookings via their mobile devices” said David Wright, VP Hotel Distribution, Sol Melia. “As a global hotel chain, it was important these services were accessible worldwide, and MTT’s mobile platform provided a tried and tested solution.”

Mobile services developed for Sol Melia Mobile use MTT’s intelligent mobile hotel platform, m2bed, to fulfil the hotel chain’s requirements, automatically directing customers to a view of the site relevant to their country and optimised for their particular device. The site has been developed with a usability focused User Interface, with minimised clicking, typing and scrolling required. Travellers can quickly locate a particular hotel, find directions or check hotel facilities, by drilling down from an initial country listing. For each hotel, users can scroll through hotel images, find details of hotel amenities, and locate hotels on a map, generated via a link to Google Maps.

Customers in Spain can ‘click to call’ the Sol Melia call centre at any point, with customers in other geographic locations directed to a full list of reservations centres by country. Links are also provided within the site to Sol Melia corporate information.

Gerry Samuels, Founder and Executive Director, MTT, comments: “As we enter a year of anticipated rapid growth in demand for mobile travel services, Sol Melia Mobile is going to be a very important service for Sol Melia customers in Spain and worldwide, providing enhanced convenience to business travellers.”