Like many industries, Travel and Hospitality is set to take off again following looser Covid-19 requirements. Many consumers are itching to get out of their houses, see new landscapes, and make up for lost time over the past two years by exploring new places. As we mentioned in our recent article How Digital Marketing Helps the Hospitality & Tourism Industry, travel experts predict:
- Rapid growth in leisure travel with a continued preference for domestic/local travel (booked last minute with a preference for short distances away from home)
- Longer out of office trips & family vacations
- Increased business travel
- More focus on booking through mobile web and apps
This means the industry is ripe with opportunity for T&H companies that are prepared for an onslaught of last-minute bookings. Whether individuals are planning for work or fun, they’re likely doing it from their smart device. They fully expect the convenience of booking from a browser or app on their phone and personalized offers that reflect the criteria they’ve been searching for.
How can your global business meet these needs of its customers?
By providing personalization at scale. To start, your company must understand the value of personalization for your brand and your customers who are urgently searching. Then, you have to identify areas of opportunity for personalization across your digital touchpoints and finally, define your personalization roadmap.
Similar to our work within another industry, personalization requires strategic planning, data maintenance and governance, as well as digital intelligence. All these pieces come together to achieve one brand style, look, feel and voice for several sites with localized content in different regions across the globe. That’s exactly what we did with our client JLL. We launched 48 sites, in 17 languages, in 16 months.
Personalization in the Travel and Hospitality Industry
To apply this type of strategy to a T&H use case, imagine your own recent vacation search on AirBnB, VRBO, Kayak, Expedia, United, Southwest, Marriott, Hilton, or the like.
You likely input your destination, travel dates, number of travelers, and preferred price range. Perhaps you weren’t sure of the destination but did know the latter variables. I’m sure you expected the website you were searching on to automatically populate the information you already provided. It saves you time, makes your experience more seamless, and benefits the company since you’re more likely to book because you’re not bogged down by friction.
By leveraging personalization, those T&H companies are able to offer up content regarding interesting things to do in that area, events going on during those dates, inventory available during your time period. It’s the exact same scenario our team was able to achieve with JLL. Where they needed to offer particular real estate listings or thought leadership on a topic, T&H companies can offer other flights, places in the area to stay, or cool activities to check out.
To accomplish this massive feat, we can help you map data inputs and goal metrics, map key initiatives to your goals and create a personalization strategy that supports each goal. We can look at the data in your analytics platform and use your customer data to power your company’s personalization experience.
We don’t want you to miss the surge of travel activity that is about to take place. To capitalize on people’s thirst to experience something new, you’ll have to ensure your digital technology, data and analytics capabilities, and strategic roadmap are ready to handle the influx of bookings. How can we help you ensure you and your customers capture these deals? Let’s get in touch.
