How to Pack Personalization into Consumers’ Travel Experiences
Today in the hospitality industry, travel is more personal than ever. Earning the business and loyalty of travelers demands developing an understanding of each customer’s personal preferences, as well as responding to their needs and anticipating changes. It requires providing access to digital channels that ease and enhance their experience, along with using the wealth of customer data to improve your brand and hospitality marketing. With travelers demanding digital convenience, travel brands need to have a digital hospitality marketing strategy that engages customers, partners, and employees in a personalized way. Fortunately, Apigee created the e-book, Delivering Customized Experiences in Travel and Hospitality. It features the following unique suggestions and strategies to make your guests’ travel experiences into personalized pleasures.
Create Engaging Experiences Customized to Customers
Travel brands must cater to many types of guests on many different levels, from the business traveler to the vacationing family to the young couple. This means that they first need to anticipate the different needs of each segment, and then use their specific customer data to further personalize each travel experience. This personalization includes providing timely and relevant offers, creating individual experiences that meet their unique interests, and integrating their prior preferences into their current stay. This all requires customer data collected from their behavioral patterns, demographic details, and social media interactions. By combining this transactional and contextual data and utilizing it in their hospitality marketing efforts, travel brands can glean a better understanding of customers and personalize their experiences.
Power Partnerships with Digital
For many in the hospitality industry, partnerships are a priority. The success of these pairings depends on distributing accurate information about their offers and properties. Yet this had previously been time consuming and tedious, so hotels had to pay others for these services. But today, APIs make it simple for third-party partners to easily access the most updated and accurate information on a property, and then integrate that data into their online sites and operations, plus share it with relevant sources.
“Through digital leadership, we can capitalize on partnerships and technologies to create enabling opportunities for our partners and our customers,” says Brad Jaehn, vice president of product at Gogo, a leading provider of in-air Internet connectivity.
Personalize the Customer Experience with Data
Did you know that 74% of marketers developed a competitive market advantage in customer engagement and loyalty by using data-driven marketing? This was revealed in a recent survey by Forbes and Turn, which showed the competitive and consumer value of using data to develop more personalized customer experiences. And APIs are at the heart of this strategy. APIs allow a company to access a wealth of digital data, which provides valuable insights that can be leveraged to provide customers with an optimal experience in an optimized way.
Exceed Expectations to Be Exceptional
Travel has always been about the experience. But today, that experience has expanded from the real world to the digital realm and it starts from the moment consumers browse online for travel, and spans beyond the end of their trips. As a result, a travel brand must bolster its hospitality marketing strategy with digital experiences that go beyond the standard to the spectacular. This includes:
- Constantly providing exceptional and unexpected experiences.
- Engaging customers and partners at every stage of the travel process.
- Regularly updating the business to keep up with customer needs and expectations.
- Personalizing both online and on-site experiences based on customer data.
- Developing new experiences, products, and services to retain customers and gain a competitive advantage.
- Creating partnerships to expand the brand’s reach and capabilities.
Today, travelers expect more than ever from their travel experiences. Luckily, digital tools and technology provide travel and hospitality brands with exciting new ways to engage these travel audiences on a more personal level. Let these useful ideas and insights be a guide to leveraging that digital connection to provide a more personal experience and stay ahead of the competition.
Discover what’s happening in hospitality marketing. Contact MDG.
MDG, a full-service advertising agency with offices in Boca Raton and New York, NY, is one of Florida’s top hospitality marketing companies and branding firms. MDG’s core capabilities include advertising, branding, logo design, creative, infographic development, digital marketing, creative media planning and buying, radio and TV advertising, website design and development, email marketing, mobile marketing, content marketing, social media marketing, and SEO. To keep up with the latest trends in hospitality marketing and advertising, contact MDG.