It’s not easy when — along with major growth — the travel and tourism sector has seen other changes too. The spread of online travel agencies, the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), and customers’ demands for unique destination experiences and seamless self-service all have a role to play in how you attract and retain customers.
The Data Dilemma
One challenge is dealing with the vast data generated in your operations, such as information about your customers’ travel destinations, preferences, budgets, and much more. Turning it into meaningful customer experiences can lead to higher conversions, stronger engagement and repeat business.
But, even with all the data you have, there’s a whole element that may be missing from your efforts.
Travelers are looking for an easy search process to find personalized and timely offers of just the right destination. For that, you need knowledge about their interactions elsewhere online, such as travel content consumed on external sites and recent searches.
The AI Answer
This is where AI can be super helpful. An AI-powered marketing automation platform can help you better understand user interest and behavior to create unique, personalized, relevant messaging and recommendations for each customer. It’s these customized interactions that drive conversions and loyalty. Here are some of the key AI applications that travel marketers can leverage to create meaning engagement.
1. Understand user intent based on behavior outside the brand app/website
Sophisticated AI platforms like AIQUA not only analyze internal consumer data, but also seek to understand users’ external interests based on comprehensive data outside your own app or website. These insights can be used to offer hyper-personalized recommendations mapped to the consumer interest.
2. Identify the need of first time visitors before they land
AI also allows you to decipher user preferences before they even engage with your platforms, and so you can personalize content for prospects when they first land on your website or app.
3. Identify the right opportunity
AI can identify exactly what your consumers are looking for, when, and on which device, letting you engage seamlessly with them across screens using the right message and offer.
4. Effectively scale marketing efforts
By detecting patterns across your most valuable customers, AI can help you effectively scale marketing efforts by segmenting your consumers and creating lookalike audiences based on similar interests and preferences.
As the travel industry changes, one thing will remain the same: customer focus. By leveraging AI, you can now connect with customers at a hyper-personalized level, and create one-to-one engagement.
* To learn more about how you can take advantage of AI to engage with travelers in a smarter and more personalized way, plus real-world examples, download our latest white paper “Enabling Travel Marketing to Fly High: How the Travel Industry Is Using Artificial Intelligence to Drive Meaningful Engagement” now.