Travel is far more than just a series of bookings and reservations. It’s a journey woven with emotions and an investment in experiences. Whether your customers are first-time adventurers or seasoned globetrotters, each interaction with your brand contributes to their travel story. However, even the most meticulously planned journey can encounter turbulence. Issues such as misplaced luggage, delayed flights or booking mix-ups — often caused by third-party providers — can quickly test your brand’s resilience.
Crafting emotional journeys: Beyond bookings and reservations
Your guests seek a genuine connection with you that extends beyond transactional loyalty programs and personalized attention that recognizes their unique preferences and history. As the complexity and costs of travel rise, the expectation for seamless experiences grows. Customers value the peace of mind that comes from 24/7 support, ready to quickly adapt, resolve issues and proactively anticipate and prevent potential problems, ensuring an uninterrupted and tailored travel experience.
Modern travelers are redefining their journeys by blending work and leisure. This trend maximizes both time and money but also introduces a complex series of interactions with multiple service providers — airlines, hotels, car rentals — each often isolated from the others. Anticipating and understanding the needs of all stakeholders (travelers, agents and partners) and proactively addressing these needs is essential for success.
Using technology for seamless, personalized travel experiences
The quality of guest interactions significantly influences future travel choices. Ensuring guest loyalty means delivering a unified, integrated experience across all platforms from start to finish. Digital technology plays a crucial role here. Travelers increasingly rely on social media, online searches, forums, reviews and recommendations from brands to be inspired, gather information and plan trips.
These interactions generate valuable data for you to gain deeper customer insights, enabling extensive personalization at every stage — discovery, planning, custom offers and real-time response to their needs during trips. Even when disruptions occur, a personalized approach prioritizing empathy and understanding in your customer care strategies will help build customer loyalty, turning even the most challenging service moments into testimonials of your brand’s commitment to exceptional customer experience.
As a travel and hospitality brand, you must think holistically about the customer journey to develop deeper loyalty with your guests. This is easier said than done. It requires a focus on enhanced personalization, using technology to customize each interaction based on individual travel patterns and preferences. Brands that maintain continual engagement and adapt offers based on evolving customer needs can help every trip feel catered to the traveler — a match made in heaven.
Untapped data could be driving your loyalty members to play the field
Travel loyalty programs were once mainly used to influence customer behavior. Over the years, however, some brands have lost sight of the original purpose of these programs: improving the customer experience.
Today, it’s not just about where customers go, but how they prefer to get there, the experiences they seek and the purchases they make along the way. Through their loyalty programs, brands have access to extensive customer data, including flights with airlines, hotel stays, car rentals, in-app purchases and more. This coupled with data from third-party sources provides a better view of customer behavior. However, the massive amount of information generated can be overwhelming. Despite this wealth of information, many travel and hospitality companies have yet to fully use it to deliver the same level of personalization seen in other industries.
Let’s get personal: Cracking the data code
The challenge is figuring out which data is important. Marketing technology (MarTech) helps by focusing on factors that companies can control and using tools like sentiment analysis and machine learning (ML) to understand customer behavior. MarTech allows companies to group customers into segments based on similar traits. These segments can be broad — or macro-segmentation — like grouping customers by business or leisure travel, or very detailed — or micro-segmentation — like considering multiple characteristics of an individual customer.
Simple segmentation can be done with basic tools and doesn’t require advanced analytics. However, it often misses important patterns. Companies with advanced data and MarTech capabilities can use AI and ML for more precise segmentation, breaking customers into smaller, more specific groups. The most detailed approach, hyper-segmentation, looks at multiple characteristics of an individual, creating a “segment of one.” This allows companies to create flexible and strategic customer groups.3
Unlocking this potential could transform guest experiences, making every interaction unique and enhancing overall satisfaction. The challenge now is for travel and hospitality companies to bridge this gap, using their rich data resources to offer highly personalized services that meet and exceed customer expectations.
With the right approach, brands can craft each touchpoint to offer unmatched personalization for each traveler. This hyper-segmentation can build loyalty and create an experience that feels exclusively tailored. It’s what will keep your members loyal to you rather than playing the field, looking for a new partner.
Key takeaways
Use technology for integrated customer experiences. Provide a unified and integrated experience across all platforms.
Leverage CX analytics to enhance personalization and loyalty. Use CX analytics to understand customer preferences and predict needs, enabling proactive service adjustments in real time.
Create unique customer experiences with hyper-segmentation. Employ advanced data analysis and hyper-segmentation to understand individual customer preferences in detail and create highly personalized experiences.
3 - Skift and McKinsey, “The promise of travel in the age of AI,” skift.com.