The Digital Transofrmation of Traveling: Time Travel

Travel went digital first and a long time. The magnitude of Digital Travel will reach over $800 billion $ by 2020 according to the 2018 PhocusWire report. Today’s travelers are mostly inspired and driven by online channels including OTAs, TripAdvisor, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and many other travel touchpoints in their travel decision. Booking.com is now the most popular travel site worldwide, with more than 450 monthly visitors in this past year. TripAdvisor has 325 million monthly users offering a wide range of services to travelers across the world.

However, the 80% shopping cart abandonment rate in travel is a real challenge so it is critical to generate preference and a convincing digital experience, as well as benefits in your direct digital channel traction, increasing occupancy and maximizing your digital ROI. The most critical challenge is understanding and optimizing conversion and attribution. Today’s average conversion rate for most travel players is less than 3 %, according to a study by Fastbooking.

Maximizing conversion and attribution is not getting any easier. The travelers’ process of looking for their next travel accommodations is becoming more complex with increasing interactions and digital touchpoints according to the latest travel clickstream studies. The standard purchase journey for a hotel room has at least 45 digital touchpoints on multiple devices and lasts an average 36 days according McKinsey Research. Most travel players need to further innovate their value propositions and redesign their current operational models, or will face disruption. Growth strategies and traveler satisfaction enablers are vastly dependent on digital experiences in travel. Effective digital marketing strategies are a must facing 2020, and travel players must think different and have greater ambition using data driven solutions.

The United Nations World Tourism Organization is currently promoting Travel Tech Adventures in every region (Argentina, Bahrein, Spain, Colombia, Chile,…) connecting the startup ecosystem with venture capital firms and large travel players in order to drive innovation and promote disruptive traveler centric business models. Startups such as Klook or Turismoi have successfully captured the business model opportunity of the tour marketplace.

Increasing Customer Life Value is the top priority for most CXOs. Travel players have also realized that travelers are worth much more than their mere transactional value. Engaged consumers also build brand reputation, attract new guests, and generate improved financial returns – based on loyalty attribution models. Expedia and Booking have taken advantage of the loyalty dynamics generating consumer preference and increasing life time value. Business intelligence means understanding every critical step and the key pain points of the consumer journey.

Most travel players are far from implementing predictive capabilities for brand, customer, and business development, using advanced metrics with digital traceability. Today, Martech technologies and dynamic digital business indicators makes it possible to capture, interpret, verify and optimize everything in real time. Business automation based on machine learning is a must for all travel players, as well as deploying artificial intelligence integrating hundreds of datasets powered by a datalake. It is also possible to adopt an already built data platform solution (such as Mabrian) enabling your digital teams to use travel intelligence as a powerful competitive advantage enabler.

The leading travel companies must embrace the full breadth of the digital marketing roadmap and data driven marketing capacities applied to the critical business challenges. The strategic digital framework must drive Brand Power and Meaningfulness, Customer Experience and Financial traction. Only then will it be possible to overcome the current poor ratios that, according to studies by Forrester, indicate that only 37% of companies really understand their travelers’ needs and only 10% of companies have smart real-time strategic capabilities. According to the latest Amadeus research of the travel industry - 41% of the business and 60% of leisure travel purchases are performed online. Digital marketing teams must interpret and design innovative solutions based on the latest digital travel trends:

• Over 40% of travel site visits come from mobile | ThinkwithGoogle.
• 83 percent of travelers “usually or always” reference reviews to feel confident about making their booking decision | Tripadvisor.
• 52 percent of Facebook users say their friends’ photos inspire their travel plans | Facebook.
• 97 percent of millennials say they share pictures while traveling, especially on Facebook and Instagram | Facebook.
• Google data found that hotels and flights are booked in advance of 12 weeks. Within the 3 months prior to the trip date, the search increases further for experiences | Google.

The best practice digital marketing strategic framework must be based on the digital Life Time Value pipeline. It is important to adopt an effective and renewed approach. Digital marketing must be fast moving, and always measurable as well as traceable. It is much more than implementing digital advertising in ongoing way. Focusing too much on digital advertising can become expensive and ineffective for ROI and customer experience purposes.

The key drivers of an effective digital marketing strategy are:

1. Engaging and Optimized Digital Assets with a Mobile first approach. It is the best way to drive business results 24 x 7.
2. Smart Social Media Activity enable businesses to reach out and engage directly with their travelers. Make sure you implement the best practices of digital customer service on all social networks.
3. Search Engine Optimization: SEO must be a priority and it is important to understand the long tail concept.
4. Email Marketing. Email with a personalization approach is critical. It must be connected to your inbound strategy and well planned.
5. Engaging Content: Effective content development across all online platforms should be engaging and useful. Travel companies must engage with their key audiences and move beyond than just selling products.
6. Mobile-Friendly: Over 60% of travel traffic is performed on a mobile. Make sure you adapt your digital assets with a mobile first approach. The latest Travel research has shown that half of the online booking operations are mobile. Mobile only conversions are on the rise according to the latest travel clickstream research.
7. Chatbots: Customer Experience chatbots must be deployed since it has been proven their impact in customer satisfaction and offer costs savings opportunities. Over 40% of digital advanced players will adopt this technology by 2020 according to Forbes.

Digital Marketing in travel must also maximize the engagement and return on investment driven by paid media campaigns. Social Media is most effective way based on targeted audiences and building P2P communities. Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube offer innovative travel paid formats with thousands of audience options. It is important to always start your social paid media plan understanding the organic results of your social platforms and to prioritize your digital and business objectives. Based on these insights, your travel company will deploy a more effective digital marketing roadmap.

Social media is customer centric at its core --- so always start with your key audiences and the travel customer journey with at least five phases: inspiration, planning, booking, stay, post stay - loyalty. Always measure the CPX of your campaigns and optimize them on a daily basis. Over 80% of your future guests are already interacting with travel brands through social media according to Good Rebels research. Social media will generate brand credibility and create credible brand advocates. All travel players must put social media at the heart of their Brand, Consumer and Business Digital Strategy. Brands need to focus their energy on developing a Smart Social strategy.

Smart Social Strategies always encompasses the following success dimensions:

1. Business objectives and vision
2. Social strategy
3. Innovation
4. Creativity
5. Intelligence
6. Technology
7. Scorecard

Each of one social media marketing tactics must be connected to the 5 stages of the customer life cycle of travel - this enables a personalized and more effective approach. The social strategy must always be based on consumer behaviors and analysis of interactions. It must be a data driven approach. Every social interaction and data set is critical to better understand the ROI of your digital marketing and consumer trends.

Digital tools and technologies provide us with deeper insights into audience activity. Travel brands can build connections with people through social care strategies, co-creation initiatives and social CRM. If you want to encourage advocacy and transition your audience from one life cycle stage to another. Word of mouth continues to be one of the most effective ways of marketing travel products and services. The customer life cycle usually ends with advocacy. Travel players are challenged with converting loyal customers into brand ambassadors. Rewards programs, member get member initiatives, employee advocacy and influencer marketing are all services effective at humanizing brands, and increasing brand advocacy.

Finally, digital marketing in travel must also urgently fix the fundamental conversion aspects. Unfortunately, most travel players are investing too little attention to these conversion drivers (speed, UX, usability, design, personalization,…) which limiting the ROI of their digital strategies. Make sure you adopt a Kaizen mindset | Culture of Continuous Improvement | in your organization and always strive to ameliorate your branding, customer experience and sales results on monthly basis. Digital travel leaders must be agile and human-centered in every digital strategy decision. The key to an effective digital strategy is working smarter, not harder.