Smart approach to smartphones

Premier Inn needed a solution that harnessed mobile and — more importantly — allowed these premium customers to interact with the brand “at a time and in a way of their choice,” Paul recalls.
The approach would also need to accomplish two key objectives: promote customer engagement with the brand and streamline the process to make booking rooms and managing these bookings quicker and easier. Finally, customers “should have the opportunity to do all this on their smartphone,” regardless of make, model or platform. “While the iPhone is great, a lot of our business comes from major corporates, and the Blackberry is the smartphone of choice for many corporates.  So, we didn’t want to alienate what is a significant percentage of our customer base by just doing an iPhone app.”
Thus, to connect with the largest possible percentage of their customers Premier Inn chose to develop a multi-platform smartphone app. The company partnered with app development specialists Grapple Mobile and charged them with the task of creating a cross platform mobile application that would work on all the leading mobile devices. The project was managed by Fujitsu UK. The app was released in early January 2011.