Orbitz for Business, the corporate travel group of Orbitz Worldwide, says it has become the first major online travel company to come up with an end-to-end mobile solution that allows corporate travellers to search and book all three major travel products - hotel, flights and car rentals - directly from a web-enabled smartphone.

Published: 13 Apr 2011

Orbitz for Business, the corporate travel group of Orbitz Worldwide, says it has become the first major online travel company to come up with an end-to-end mobile solution that allows corporate travellers to search and book all three major travel products - hotel, flights and car rentals - directly from a web-enabled smartphone.

The company believes this is the first mobile offering of its kind that:

1) allows full search and booking capabilities
2) covers the big three travel products and
3) applies corporate travel policies to each reservation.

The company’s customers can now search and book travel through the next generation mobile website at http://m.orbitzforbusiness.net.

The company has highlighted that its mobile solution enables travellers to plan and purchase air, hotel and car travel through a streamlined, intuitive interface optimised for mobile devices. Also, the solution was built to support the policy, control and compliance requirements of corporate travel managers and their programmes.

Challenge

The company explained that one of the challenges in delivering a comprehensive mobile solution is the rapid pace of innovation and fragmentation in the mobile space. As mobile Internet adoption continues to outpace the desktop, there has been a proliferation of form factors, operating systems, service providers and browser technologies, with each winning in different ways (and in different regions of the world). Android and iPhone are making greater corporate inroads. Blackberry is getting better at doing multimedia. Windows Mobile is undergoing a facelift, and other OS updates are rolling out fast and furious, adding compelling new features with each iteration.

In order to build a scalable platform with a consistent user experience and full corporate travel policy application, Orbitz for Business focused its efforts on launching an optimised mobile website that only requires a user to have a web-enabled mobile device and browser. Rather than building, deploying and maintaining three or four native apps that would inevitably leave out a portion of corporate travellers, the company chose to built an agnostic platform that looks and feels like an app but offers the flexibility, scale and accessibility of the mobile web.