Head of Travelport's representative office in Russia and the CIS, Maria Yakushkina, shared with readers of the TRN portal her opinion on how data helps to rethink the travel experience and gives competitive advantages to travel agencies:
"Preference Analysis travelers will completely change the travel industry. Once we understand the changing needs of customers and create customized offers and marketing plans, today's return-on-trip success metric will become a thing of the past. Instead, the return-on-customer model will become relevant, the main idea of which is to maintain and retain customer loyalty throughout the trip.
Online travel agencies face a challenging task: to win online, they must show their customers how valuable they are and provide personal interactions. This can only be built on the basis of accurate and relevant data. With all the necessary data processing capabilities, Travelport can collect information at all stages of the traveler lifecycle and provide relevant, personalized services that meet the needs and desires of each person. In this way, data will take customer interactions to the next level and drive business growth.”
1. Inspire customers from the first search query
By analyzing key industry trends, web data, and purchase history, we can create offers that will excite and engage customers from the very first search. We can also send them personalized offers when they are most likely to book — typically about 80 days before their trip. Engaging with customers who are initially interested will reduce your advertising costs on Google and other channels. Working with data also helps you choose the right time to launch individual offers and advertising campaigns in general — this will reduce your overall customer acquisition costs for your business.
2. Improve the shopping experience by making offers more relevant
To improve the online shopping experience, it is necessary to interact with travelers personally and use a personalized approach. With in-depth personalized analysis, each customer can be offered content relevant to their needs, related to flights, hotels, cars and more. In addition to increasing conversion, this approach gives travelers the opportunity to choose from the options that are more relevant to them. This eliminates friction in the purchase process, saves time, improves convenience for the traveler and, as a result, helps agencies gain customer loyalty.
3. Increase bookings by optimizing prices (bestpriceproposals)
By basing your pricing policy on industry data analysis as a whole, you can create the best price offers for your clients. This will ensure your clients' trust and confidence in the quality of the services they receive. Analyzing pricing dynamics on the market during similar periods allows you to predict trends in the cost of offers. This will help clients determine whether they should wait for a price reduction, buy now, or follow advice. By becoming a reliable consultant for your clients and saving them money, your agency will be able to build strong, trusting relationships that will last for a very long time.
4. Increase revenue through pre-trip engagement
Travelport research has shown that travelers who receive only one pre-trip marketing offer generate nearly half a billion dollars per month for travel agencies. This represents a $6 billion annual market, but its potential is unfortunately not fully realized. To make more money from these customers, you need to launch pre-trip, engaging marketing campaigns that include relevant offers for the customer right up until their departure.
5. Create and improve traveler experiences
With the right data, strategy, and partner, you can help your customers have better experiences while they’re on-travel, too. In fact, this can add another layer to travelers’ vacation budgets, which now average more than $5,000. Options include recommending local events, experiences, and even restaurants that best match customers’ personal needs and preferences. This approach can improve their travel experience and open up new revenue streams by collecting data on their choices. The result will be better offers in the future.
6. Build profitable customer relationships that last a lifetime
Streaming video services like Netflix show us what we should watch next. Amazon recommends what to buy. Spotify suggests what we might listen to. They can do this because they use data to analyze our interests and see the preferences of people with a similar consumption profile. Today, we can do the same with travel. Based on customer profiles and travel intent, gaining insights into what works and what doesn’t, we can make the travel industry more intelligent to inspire, excite, and engage our customers.
The key to implementing this approach is to engage with customers after their trip to get detailed feedback on their search, booking, travel arrangements and travel experience. Based on this feedback and a range of other insights, we can create an accurate customer profile that helps companies’ offerings stay relevant even as travelers’ personal situations and travel needs change.
Source: trn-news.ru
