Why Restaurant / Hospitality Industry Must Develop Mobile App?

Recent surveys in mobility adoption for different businesses have revealed followings:

1. Two leading mobile app marketplaces for iOS and Android are harboring more than 1.5 million applications.
2. Smartphones are possessing average 40 apps and smartphones are often used by young people.
3. In the US, 85% travelers search places to eat predominantly using mobile apps.

Above findings are strongly supporting the significance of mobile app usage in the hospitality industry, and restaurants are the most profitable niche.

Social Media & Restaurant Business

Today we have the Internet available for all sorts of computing devices including smartphones and tablets. We can access websites and web services to retrieve information regarding where to dine and what to dine while traveling in unknown territories.

On the internet, we have social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. for general purposes where we can ask our social circles regarding a particular place, but other niche specific sites are providing interesting info regarding hospitality industry as a whole.

For instance, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Foursquare, and OpenTable have internationally recognized names. People visits these sites when they need to find a new spot to dine, drink wine, go for a cocktail, or just look for a robust cup of coffee, alone, with a company, or in a group.

These specific social media sites have their mobile applications provide reviews, ratings, comments, and recommendations for hotels, restaurants, bars, and lodges. Therefore, such sites and their mobile apps are highly popular among the tourists and innovation/change seekers.

They can obtain comments regarding offers, services, ambiance, location, hygiene, etc. in a restaurant of your choice. If you are in the restaurant business, the presence of your business and positive reviews of comments can make much difference in your traffic, hence in your growth.

These known apps have advanced search options so tourists and frequent travelers can search their intended destination by category, price range, and location preferences. Moreover, access to food items, menu, and price tags ease the decision-making process greatly for them.

How to Leverage These Communities in Your Favor When you join in these communities or sites, they provide you the opportunity to depict your restaurant business with the best presentation. You can place a link for your website access and most importantly for your mobile application access so they can download it straight from their app via app stores.

Technically, mobile apps are delivering excellent user experiences due to access to native hardware and OS features. Against it, browser-based mobile friendly websites cannot.

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Therefore, your restaurant business has to spend some more on mobile app development along with a web identity. Therefore, Starbucks, McDonalds, Pizza Hut, Subway, etc. leading brands have own mobile applications besides fully operating websites and web applications.\

What they have done is the integration of the internet identity with mobile identity through a shared database and web services including cloud services.

Contribution of Mobile Application in Your Restaurant Business

As discussed earlier, mobile applications can integrate the leading review sites for travel and hospitality industries so you can get

Plenty of quality traffic
Reputations among your audience
Viral marketing opportunities
Recognition of your business
Branding opportunities
Can build unique community for your business

The most important befits are tools for restaurant promotions such as:

Headers and Banners to advertise your business and offerings in real-time
The best presentation opportunities for your business using multimedia content including mouthwatering images of your food items, videos of your food events, and so on
Smart presentation of your menu with multimedia content as well as categorize menu items using various advanced filters
Display of the latest offers
Tools for marketing incentives including discounts, delivery offerings, gifts like Two-in-One offers, vouchers for repeat visitors, and others
Table booking tools with interior layouts
Multimedia presentations for ambiance of restaurant to lure visitors
Display of the latest news, events, and happening in restaurants as well as in surroundings

Mobile app offers several other advantages for your restaurant including

Ability to book order, edit it or cancel it before deadlines
Guests can book tables of their choices
Guests make custom orders for their events, occasions, or parties along with recipes
Guests can redeem their incentives received from daily deals and other sites
Guest can make payment in advance as well as after dinner/launch
Users can book catering orders with online, card, or mobile payments
Users can benefits from pickup services with advance payment
Users can enjoy discount and other marketing promotions on catering services too
Users can find the restaurant and distance from their locations to know whether they fall in delivery limits or not

Mobile App Solutions in the Market

It is but natural for you as a restaurant owner that you crave for a robust mobile application for you. However, developing an own mobile app is not easy and cheaper option as you think of it.

Of course, markets across the globe have some ready to use solutions for most of the restaurant owners such as

Commonly used mobile apps are Foursquare, Yelp, TripAdvisor UrbanSpoon, and OpenTable
Restauranteur is a free app to plan out the next opening of your restaurant branch at another location
AccuPOS Restaurant is POS app to help restaurant with specific features and functionality pertaining to restaurants of different types
AppSuit is restaurant loyalty and reward program application for restaurant owners and managers
The Local is social app with location-based services or offerings
eZee eMenu is for menu ordering
Lettuce is an inventory management app and integrates sales, orders, payments, CRM and other functions
Inventory Tracker is to track your restaurant’s inventory in real-time

After analyzing ready-to-use mobile applications in the market, you may have realized that different applications serve different purposes, and not all restaurants have the same requirements.

Therefore, developing your unique mobile app for your unique restaurant is a wise decision and a custom mobile app can deliver great user experiences for you as well as your visitors or guests.

Of course, before thinking of custom mobile app development, you should have awareness of the features and functionality for your mobile app so let’s dive in it

Expected Features & Functionality in Your Mobile App for Restaurant Business

In order to leverage the before-mentioned great offerings, your mobile app developers should infuse some essential features and functionality in your mobile application for your restaurant. For instance,

Basic data are providing facilities such as name, address, contact details, etc.
Mobile app menu
Mobile app booking
Online booking or ordering of food
Details of catering
Availability hours
Location details with Interactive Maps
Social media integration
Photo and video gallery
Calendar for events and routines
Rating, review, and commenting facilities
Push notification features
POS features and functionality
CRM features and functionality
Payment gateway integration and implementation of different payment methods
In-premise ordering, order editing, and order cancellation features
Restaurant waiter tipping features
Analytics
Report generation functionality
Inventory management features and functionality

Conclusion

After getting an overall picture of your mobile app for your restaurant business, you should proceed to have one for you too, and custom mobile app development is the best option to follow.

Custom mobile app development for the restaurant is not cheaper yet not unbearable or unaffordable at all. What you need is the support of highly experienced and expert team of mobile app developers or a mobile app development company.

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Outsourcing app development is the most practical and feasible alternative if you think of it. Perception System provides Mobile App Development Services to give you the best client experiences for your mobile app development project.

Instant communication, the latest development technologies, tools, strategies, and use of transparent project management system are some attractive offering from the team of Perception System, and you can leverage such advanced offerings with affordability.