Today’s travellers are very individualistic and highly intolerant of unsolicited ads popping up on social media pages or generic spam email bombarding their inbox (even if they may have opted to receive email from the organisation). While travel organisations are trying to personalize their messages – from personalizing the headline to reflect the person’s name to sending targeted offers based on past purchases – these efforts are being met with limited success as customers become choosier than ever about the content that they consume.
So, what is the missing piece of the puzzle? It is Context. Even if you have taken the care to personalise your messages based on the data that you have, your audience is unlikely to consume your content unless the context is relevant.
Here’s an example. Let’s say you are exploring options for a holiday in Europe and get in touch with the travel company to get options for the same. If the company uses this as a basis to regularly send you offers on European holidays, it is unlikely to cut ice with you because a) you already went to Europe last year b) you don’t want to go in the dead of winter b) you were looking for the Europe information on behalf of a friend and aren’t really keen yourself. So, while data is important, what matters even more is context.
Personalization + Context = Useful Insight
Instead of looking simply at data, contextual personalization is about looking at data in the larger context in order to find useful insights. For example, while you may have data such as demographics, details of past purchases etc., contextual personalization means looking deeper to consider things such as the local weather, big events or life events or personal priorities.
Getting the Right Data at Each Touchpoint
If we look at the cycle that an average traveller goes through, there are some distinct stages as below. When talking to Sonata’s travel clients, we’ve found that getting data at each touch point and sharing the information that is relevant at each stage is an important aspect of contextual personalization.
Stage
Opportunity
Inspiration for travel often comes from an online source, whether it is through a friend’s social media post or through an interesting online article.
Personalized and targeted offers via multiple touch points can boost interest and convert.
Search for options happens either through Meta search, OTA, etc.
Consistent omnichannel engagement, with a convenient Shopping Cart, recommendations can boost sales.
Purchase happens through online banking or reward points
Allowing flexible payment options such as multiple-currency, payment gateway, ensuring PCI DSS to encourage purchase.
Post booking engagement in the form of notifications, reminders etc.
Better engagement through proactive Disruption Management and relevant cross sell.
On trip, travelers explore local activities, look for guides etc.
A Destination App can improve engagement and boost revenue opportunities
Post trip, visitors are likely to share, refer, review
Continued engagement by soliciting feedback will encourage customers to stay connected.
At an organisation’s backend, this means having access to the right data at the right time. For instance, one of our clients, a leading travel company, decided to invest in a digital transformation initiative that enabled it to deliver a superior customer experience through Personalization, Recommendations and Multilingual capabilities. Today, the online medium accounts for about 50% of its total sales. To know more, click here or write in to us at subhash.s@sonata-software.com