On Saturday night, on a whim, S and I decided to go watch a movie. We were, for various reasons, trying to kill time out in the Eastern suburbs, which we weren’t so familiar with, and were tossing up between having dinner somewhere or watching a movie, or going to a bar for a drink.
As S drove around in the general direction of civilisation (we hoped), I googled “Eastland cinema”, and the Hoyts iPhone app popped up.
Hmm, I thought. Intriguing.
And promptly, of course, went to the App Store and downloaded it.
And was duly impressed.
Truly.
The Hoyts iPhone App delivered quite the user experience – in 3 minutes flat, I worked out how to use it, picked our movie, and selected our tickets. It’s user-interface is wonderfully simple and slick looking, and I love that it’s extremely fast to load each page.
simple, pretty interface
You can search by Movies or Cinema, and once you do, buying a ticket is just about 2 taps away. You can choose your seat easily, and that’s that.
Then, you simply enter your credit card details, and the receipt is stored in your “Purchases” section. You don’t need to have an account, register, or sign in (though if you have a Hoyts account, you can use it on this app too), which means a hassle-free transaction.
I think this was one of the major selling points for me – if you give your customers an easy, clear path to purchasing, chances are, they will buy more easily and happily and impulsively. Which is kind of what happened to us. I went from “maybe we should watch a movie” to “I bought tickets!” before S had even left the next set of traffic lights.
Within seconds, the barcode was sent to me and all I had to do when we rocked up at Eastland Hoyts was display my purchase barcode to the nice lady at the counter. She scanned it, and BOOM, we were in.
It actually was harder and took longer to find the right carpark to park in at Eastland.
So there you go. If you’re a movie aficionado, you need this app – it has definitely endeared me to Hoyts, and it certainly helped that their La Premiere experience was pretty damn good too. Plus, the app is free. What more do you need in life? 
