Hotels.com and Apple Pay
Hotels.com is at the forefront of technology developments within the travel industry and is always looking to give its customers a best in class hotel reservation service. In fact it is our mission to offer an unsurpassed booking experience. Just one of the ways we do this is by providing customers with an array of payment options, so they can pay for their perfect hotel using a payment method that suits them.
When Apple Pay was announced in late 2014 we were excited to say the least. We saw the opportunity to really enhance our booking service using Apple Pay and got to work almost immediately planning the best way to get Apple Pay to our customers. Overall we see Apple Pay as another amazing way for Hotels.com to provide a market-leading experience to our customers, helping them find and book the perfect hotel.
Globally, the Hotels.com iOS app supports over 15 different payment types including Pay Pal, instalment payments in Brazil, and many others. Therefore it was a natural next step to provide those iOS users with Apple Pay enabled devices the option to easily book with their preferred payment method. Roughly half of our iOS customers interact with Hotels.com on Apple Pay enabled devices and this number is growing rapidly both in the United States and in our major markets across the globe. Though this number does vary be region and country, it still gives us proof that our customers are moving towards a frictionless way to pay for their purchases and reassures us that adding Apple Pay to our array of payment options will be welcomed by our customers.
Payment security and customer safety is critical to the success of Hotels.com, meaning we needed to integrate Apple Pay in a well-planned and researched way. That said, once our development team started working on the integration it went smoothly and adding the Apple Pay infrastructure was painless. Apple provides all the necessary documentation and examples on their Apple Pay developer site but was always willing to help out and work with us directly when any questions or pain points arouse. Our iOS developers found the whole process seamless from planning to launch and are proud to have been involved in such an important project for the business, as well as being part of something they know will help our customers have an even better booking experience. Will Parkinson, Hotels.com Senior Product Manager for iOS, says it best:
“We’re really excited about getting Apple Pay live to our US users. We set up a dedicated team to specifically deliver Apple Pay into our app and it’s fair to say that we really loved working with Apple Pay. We particularly enjoyed working with the PKPaymentButton. As a global company that needs to support many different languages, the PKPaymentButton’s ability to dynamically resize based on text input and screen resolution was incredibly useful, allowing us to stress test our designs perfectly. We also enjoyed using the PKPaymentAuthorisationViewController, it was super easy to work with and provided us with really useful delegate callbacks which made our lives a lot easier. We are really excited to get our first launch of Apple Pay out to our customers and we look forward to rolling out to more points of sale in the near future.”
The excitement around Apple Pay extends outside of our product teams and the overall business is looking forward to seeing our customers use Apple Pay in order to help us achieve that unsurpassed booking experience we’re all working towards.
Our first Apple Pay release is only available in the United States, but we will quickly look to expand this to other countries as soon as we can. We operate in 89 points of sale and it is fair to say we are working hard on getting Apple Pay enabled in our app in as many of these countries as we can. As more and more Apple customers move to Apple Pay enabled devices and as more payment processors in different countries are added to the Apple Pay platform, we expect our number of happy iOS customers to increase exponentially! Hotels.com sees Apple Pay as a long term gain in terms of conversion of our app customers but more importantly we see the great value this offers our customers, as they now have a choice of how they would like to pay for their hotel stay.
We couldn’t be happier that we are now officially launching Apple Pay to our customers!
