Jaunted

On the other hand, we greeted the Priceline mobile app as something that "will help you book hotels the way people actually book hotels," because when you need a hotel from the road you're searching for last-minute rooms based on price and location, not based on brand like Omni Hotels wanted to pretend. It suffices to say that Priceline has spent the last few months rolling out one new last-minute booking option after another. Again, nothing particularly surprising.

Now CNN has just published their predictions for the next generation of airline apps. And while some new features have us excited, others are giving us that nagging "will people really use that like this" vibe.

Delta, for instance, is rolling out a feature that will let you track your luggage from inside a mobile application. That's not a huge deal—you can already do that over the web for lots of airlines, which means you can do it over a smartphone—but it's exactly the kind of small feature that someone on the way to a hotel will appreciate. Much more significantly, there are several efforts afoot to help flyers reroute their itineraries after delays and cancellations. That's helpful for the same reason that a last-minute hotel booking app like Priceline makes sense: that's exactly what you need when you need it.

Extensive plans to install airport maps and augmented reality features, on the other hand, seem less useful. Augmented reality, except in niche areas like museums, is currently in a race to the bottom with FaceTime as the coolest thing that nobody uses. There's talk of integrating augmented reality into airport maps so people can navigate their way from terminal to terminal, but have you ever looked at an airport TGI Fridays and thought "I wonder what's inside of there?" Or said to yourself "this generic restaurant next to my gate is OK, but I wonder if the generic restaurants in the next terminal are better?" Maybe that happens a lot, and we just haven't heard.

[Photo: Famifamifami / Wiki Commons]