Today’s travelers increasingly look for seamless, one-stop booking experiences, and the line between different types of travel companies has blurred. Travelers can easily find car rental or tour options on an airline or hotel website, not to mention online travel agencies that offer full services for travel.
So, success for travel brands is no longer just about getting a new customer to browse and book a fight or a hotel room. It is also about increasing your share of wallet by encouraging existing customers to complete all travel-related transactions from you as well. A comprehensive engagement and retention strategy is key to achieve that, hence ensuring a high return on investment and sustainable growth.
One way in which travel marketers can build customer engagement and loyalty is through personalized product recommendations. According to Boston Consulting Group, brands that create personalized experiences for their customers increase their revenues by 6 to 10 percent, two to three times faster than those who don’t.
AI helps in building such personalized recommendations – not based on pre-defined rules, but on insights gained from historical customer data. AI solutions consolidate data on customers’ journeys, online behaviors and purchasing patterns, in past interactions with your brand. They then use this data to analyze patterns and predict future consumer behavior. This can, in turn, help recommend products that the traveler is more likely to purchase.
Proactive Targeting to Grow Share of Wallet
Now, AI-powered customer engagement platforms such as Appier’s AIQUA use machine learning to make personalization even more specific and granular. AIQUA allows you to consolidate and analyze consumer data not only from your own platforms, but also comprehensive data on consumers outside your own app or website, thus discovering customer interest areas, preferences and shopping behavior across platforms. You can then use these insights to offer hyper-personalized recommendations mapped to customer interest.
The result: higher conversions and shortened time to purchase, which drives up profitability.
Take the example of Mike who booked a flight to Beijing on happytravel.com, but viewed tour packages on asiatours.com. AI can help happytravel.com analyze Mike’s shopping behavior on other websites to identify what other travel related purchases he is interested in and what drives conversion. This data can then help the brand identify and micro-segment users at a granular level and deliver personalized and relevant recommendations to them across devices.
Such AI solutions help you reach out to the right customer with the right product on the right channel, increasing likelihood of conversion. Accurate and personalized recommendations build customer loyalty by making the booking and buying experience easy for the traveler, who can look for and complete all the transactions they need without having to spend too much effort in the search. For travel companies, this means faster and higher conversions, as well as the increased ability to upsell items that are aligned with the customers’ interest.
* Explore more about Appier’s AIQUA, a Proactive Customer Engagement platform, and how it can help you with personalized marketing in travel today!