How Can Travel Companies Build Brand Loyalty In An Era Of Abundant Choice?

In the good old days, planning travel or vacations was a pretty straight-forward process. You went to your local travel agent, looked through all the brochures, decided on a place based on our interest and your budget and that was pretty much it. Recommendations from friends or family who were raving about a certain destination that they recently visited might have had an impact on your choice. Likewise, an interesting article in the local newspaper or a show on TV might have given you ideas on planning your next holiday.

Today, the process is not drastically different, but the number of options has exploded as has the number of influencers. Today, there are literally hundreds of websites that vie for a traveller’s attention each offering a deal better than the other. Your choice of destination can be inspired not just from your immediate circle, but also from your fourth-grade classmate’s Facebook pictures or an online review from someone you don’t know.

What does all this mean for a travel company? In an era of extreme choice, how do you ensure that your customers come back to you when they plan their next vacation? The biggest differentiator is customer experience. If you give your customers an unforgettable experience, then there is a good chance they won’t forget you either. The right technology can help!

Personalisation and Customisation

While unsolicited ads popping up on social media pages is a big turn off, promotions that are relevant are quite welcome. Therefore, personalized and targeted offers via multiple touch points can boost interest and convert. Since there is already a degree of basic understanding about the behaviour of existing customers, providing them with targeted offers is even simpler.

Consistent Omnichannel Experience

Your customers may find you in different ways. It could be through meta search, targeted ad, or by manually looking for your website. In any of these scenarios, what matters is that they experience consistent omnichannel engagement, get the right recommendations (based on their past behaviour) and a convenient Shopping Cart to help close the sale. A consistently superior experience is a great driver for loyalty.

Engagement Across Customer Journey Touchpoints

Your relationship with the customer does not end with the booking. To ensure that the customer decides to pick you even for their next trip, post booking engagement in the form of notifications, reminders, as well as proactive disruption management is valuable. For example, once on the trip, travelers explore local activities, look for guides etc. A Destination App can be a great way to not only improve engagement, but also boost revenue opportunities through relevant up-sell and cross sell. Continued engagement post the trip by soliciting feedback will encourage customers to stay connected. Of course, the more your customers share, refer, review, the better it is for you.

Flexibility and choice

In an era of abundant choice, customers appreciate the flexibility to use their preferred devices, terms of engagement and modes of payment. Allowing flexible payment options such as multiple-currency, payment gateway, ensuring PCI DSS to encourage purchase can go a long way in boosting loyalty.

Providing superior customer experience requires that the organisation have access to the right data and the right tools at the right time. In our work over the years, we’ve worked with leading travel organisations across the world deliver a superior customer experience through personalization, recommendations and multilingual capabilities. Through its Digital Transformation initiatives, our client, a leading leisure tourism company was able to achieve a 30% increase year-on-year in sale of web packages. It also enabled dynamic marketing, and an ability to cross-sell and upsell products to existing customers.

If you’d like to know more, write in to us at [subhash.s@sonata-software.com] or visit http://www.sonata-software.com/travel