Tiket.com Goes Mobile With Web Access For Smartphones

Tiket.com today launched its mobile site for smartphones and tablet users though it still lacks a more inclusive range of payment methods.

Instead of providing mobile apps tailored for all the different kinds of mobile devices, Tiket has smartly chosen the mobile web approach to cater for those looking to purchase movie tickets or book for accommodations across a number of cities in Indonesia.

The site automatically detects mobile browsers upon entering the website’s address and takes you directly to the mobile version, although if accessed on an Android tablet, you get served the full site. But if you open it through iPad’s Safari, you’ll see the mobile site.

You can of course manually enter the address for the mobile site which is http://m.tiket.com from any device, including desktop or laptop computers and it will serve you the mobile version.

In catering for moviegoers, Tiket still currently only sells seats for blitzmegaplex cinemas. Those wishing to watch movies at other cinemas will unfortunately have to do it the old fashioned way or in the case of Cinema21 studios, through its own m-tix system.

Tiket’s system conveniently allows movie patrons to choose the seats for their selected movies and pay using two methods, through blitzcards or through klikbca, although the second method is still not very well integrated as you have to exit the site and go to klikbca’s website to make the payment. Having a blitzcard certainly helps in this case.

What makes this very convenient is that those wishing to book hotel rooms or movie tickets can do so in a very practical and nearly frictionless way from a mobile device as almost everything can be handled through Tiket’s mobile website.

The mobile site is clean, well designed, easy on the eye, and very easy to use. In fact I would say it’s too easy to use which makes it very tempting to make a booking just to go through the process to the end.

One minor  flaw in the system though, is that when there is an item in the shopping cart and you would like to remove it to cancel a booking, it’s not that obvious. Instead of a big red button that says cancel, you have to find the pale blue X on the edge of the blue bar that stretches over each item.

Aside from that, the payment process could do with some improvement (credit card is not yet accepted but it’s coming) and the step by step on bookings could do with a little more detail such as adding a sequence number so visitors would know how far along the process they are.

As for mobile apps, those are apparently coming some time next year for Android, iOS, and BlackBerry but since the mobile site seems to work well enough across multiple smartphones, at this stage, I question the need for specific apps.