Mobile Printing with SmartphonesWith more and more business travelers using smartphones, the need for mobile printing is increasing rapidly. Norm Rose, senior technology and corporate market analyst at PhoCusWright, said his firm’s research show 75% of frequent business travelers – those making at least five trips a year – are smartphone owners.  Roughly half of frequent leisure travelers have smartphones.  “The key thing is the fact that the smartphone, as a category, has a much larger population of users who are using the web browser and downloadable apps,” Rose said.  “Those apps are all about giving the consumer or the business traveler control over the process while they are traveling.”

The PrintSpots Mobile Printing Solution from PrinterOn allows the business traveler the ability to print from their smartphone to any PrintSpot-enabled printer in the world. There are more than 4000 PrintSpots worldwide, most of them within hotels. Over 1400 of them are located at Hilton properties. The frequent business traveler staying at hotel with the PrinterOn service can print almost any type of document from their smartphone or laptop to a printer located at the front desk or business center of the property. A secure release code is emailed back to the user after submitting the job which is entered on the keypad at the printer. This keeps every print job private as no one else can release the print job but the user.

There are also apps available from Ricoh and HP that enable you to search for and print to the PrinterOn network of public printers. These apps have been developed in direct response to the growing use of smartphones by business travelers and the need to print from them.

As the need for printing on-the-go increases, the hospitality industry, as well as others, will have to respond to the growing demand by having the PrinterOn service deployed at their locations. In a few years, mobile printing will be as common place as Wi-Fi.