The four moments travel brands must connect with their mobile customers

Huge global smartphone adoption across the globe presents a massive opportunity for travel brands to reach consumers but where should they be focusing their efforts to maximise returns?

EyeforTravel and SAP Digital Interconnect’s new Driving Intelligent, Interconnected Mobile Engagement Throughout the Travel Journey report, which is free to download now, identifies the four key areas where travel brands need to target mobile consumers:

1. Awareness

It is becoming increasingly critical to create inspiring content that will work on mobile as consumers are most likely to be using their mobile devices early on in travel research. As more detailed, late-stage research is undertaken, most consumers in major markets move over to larger screens on desktops and laptops. Consumers therefore need to be engaged with content and made aware of the travel options and offers available. This is the first stage of influencing the buyer journey and a key mobile phase.

2. Purchase decision

Despite desktops and laptops being the main booking devices for travel purchases generally, some markets such as China are mobile-first throughout, and overall it is increasingly an omnichannel experience. Mobile is also growing globally. J.D. Power found that 25% of hotel online reservations were made using mobile in 2017, up from 14% in 2014. EyeforTravel’s 2018 research similarly finds that the median share of mobile bookings reported by travel brands is between 10% to 19%, with 58% reporting more than 10% of bookings come through mobile. Customers now expect a relatively seamless transition and look for consistency across platforms as they move down the purchase funnel.

This purchase funnel is broadening, with new channels and communication services growing. Although mobile bookings are still largely through web browsers, leading to 45% of travel brands focusing on the mobile web compared to the 22.5% focusing on apps, brands will need to shift and widen their focus. For the modern traveler, alongside established SMS, web and email channels, social media services, such as WeChat, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, are increasingly important. Not only can they now allow bookings but they are also great touch points to help the consumer get more information for their purchase journey and help them feel safe about their purchase. However, just 29% of travel brands currently have instant messaging capabilities and this will need to increase as consumer tastes change and travel brands chase low-cost distribution routes.

Improving a brand’s ability to use these emerging mobile channels can also help to address the main issues that exist with mobile booking for consumers. Key among these is security. The channels mentioned above can be used for two-factor authentication (2FA), sending security codes to approve payment, access secure pages and complete bookings. This helps drive consumer confidence in making online purchases and therefore mobile conversion rates, which are far lower in the travel industry than for desktop and laptop visitors.

3. Throughout the trip itself

Being able to reach consumers with key information as and when they need it is becoming a core competency for travel brands that want to drive a relationship and build loyalty with their customer. Among US consumers, 87% report that they find travel notifications useful and travel brands that can reach a traveler in a moment of crisis can win over a consumer for life.

Becoming the trusted source of information to the consumer as they travel is a way to wrest control of the traveler and their journey from third parties and reposition the travel brand at the core of the journey. Customer satisfaction rates are higher when they have been actively reached out to by a travel brand with relevant messaging or if they have downloaded a brand’s app.

Travel brands and technology players need to provide channels that are truly global and not just accessible in the home country or continent of the consumer. The channel has to have the presence to reach the traveler throughout their journey, especially when disruptions happen, such as a delay or change in flight.

4. Post travel

It is extremely important to get the voice of the traveler as feedback. One single bad review can influence future purchase decisions, and travel brands need to use technologies to interact and strike when they happen. Emotions run very high most recent to a bad experience and if you are able to address that then you can calm a situation and possibly turn a negative into a positive. Encourage positive reviews and social interaction post-travel to not only influence other buyers, but to also engender brand loyalty with your traveler.

Among travel brands that had automated messaging capabilities, 47% reported that they sent out satisfaction questionnaires and 37% sent out post-stay marketing. This shows that travel brands are awakening to the potential of using mobile in the post-travel period but they still have a long way to go to make the most out of this time.

Get ahead of the competition now and download this completely free mobile market report to access:

• A major industry survey of all travel verticals uncovering their mobile strategies and technology deployments.
• Analysis of how consumers are using the mobile channel.
• Projections for mobile’s growth across travel.
• Where you should be investing to reach the mobile consumer.
• How you can ensure mobile-focused communications are effective.
• An overview of how you should be measuring and overseeing an m-commerce operation.

Search and social dominate travel brands’ mobile marketing

Search engine and social marketing are the priority spending categories for 67% of travel brands’ mobile marketing budgets finds new research.

New research from EyeforTravel and SAP Digital Interconnect, which surveyed nearly 300 travel industry professionals on the topic of mobile has found that search and social have a stranglehold over mobile marketing, likely reflecting the dominance of Google and Facebook in the digital marketing sphere.

When respondents were asked what is the largest component of their mobile marketing budgets, 35% selected search and 32% social, according to EyeforTravel and SAP Digital Interconnect’s new Driving Intelligent, Interconnected Mobile Engagement Throughout the Travel Journey report, which is free to download now.

Search spending was even higher among hospitality and accommodation brands, where it was the most important category for 45.3% of brands. This preponderance is a result of the way in which consumers search for hotels, with mobile still a last-minute channel when it comes to booking and at that stage consumers are looking mainly for specific locations, largely through search engines. However, it may also indicate an over-focus on the latter stages of consumers booking journey and an acquisition-driven strategy that doesn’t fully take into account the role of mobile in inspiration and initial research phases.

One area where travel brands might look to expand spending and make the most of mobile’s role at the inspiration stage is video marketing, which was rated as most important in just 4.4% of budgets.

The small role of video marketing currently would seem to be a major missed opportunity for travel brands given the growth of mobile video consumption in recent years. A multi-country study by AOL estimated that 57% of consumers watch videos through their mobile every day and Zenith estimated that there was 20% growth in global video consumption in 2017.

Get ahead of the competition now and download this completely free mobile market report to access:

• A major industry survey of all travel verticals uncovering their mobile strategies and technology deployments.
• Analysis of how consumers are using the mobile channel.
• Projections for mobile’s growth across travel.
• Where you should be investing to reach the mobile consumer.
• How you can ensure mobile-focused communications are effective.
• An overview of how you should be measuring and overseeing an m-commerce operation.

Three travel mobile marketing trends in 2018

How will mobile change the travel industry in 2018? A new mobile market report investigates.

Mobile is a growth category for the travel industry as established markets experience rising usage and emerging markets add millions of consumers who look and book with their smartphones. It is even more vital tool for in-trip engagement as the majority of travelers globally report that they use their smartphone as their main conduit for information and communications as they travel.  It is therefore an area that travel brands must address in 2018 in order to maximise their return on investment and avoid falling behind competitors.  

Based on EyeforTravel and SAP Digital Interconnect’s new Driving Intelligent, Interconnected Mobile Engagement Throughout the Travel Journey report, here are three key ways in which mobile will influence the travel marketing in 2018.

1.      Getting to customers through their smartphones as they travel is going to be key in building a relationship

Smartphones are used most during the actual trip itself, presenting a golden time to reach them through this medium. For 67% of British, French and German consumers, the smartphone is their key device during their trip and 98% of Chinese international travelers report that they use their smartphone whilst abroad, with 65% reporting that they use their smartphone to search for restaurants or to use navigation tools.

What’s more there are more ways than ever to reach the consumer through their smartphone, none of which are being fully exploited by travel brands so far. First and foremost there are apps. Although these are difficult to get installed on a user’s device, they have excellent engagement rates and allow owners to send push notifications, which were found to be the most effective form of in-app advertising by our research. However, just a third of travel brands currently have an app. Beyond this, consumers can receive or request messages from travel brands through SMS, used by 24% of travel brands, MMS (8%), QR codes (16%), and instant messaging services (29% of travel brands). The latter of these could be key, as IHS Markit predicts that there will be 7.5 billion messaging and communication app accounts by 2020, giving unrivalled reach.

2.      Automated outreach is going to go wider and get a whole lot more effective

In order to get relevant and engaging messages to consumers, travel brands will need to automate the process through data analysis and AI-enabled services. We found that among the 41% of travel brands that have automated mobile outreach, 83% report that is effective at driving satisfaction. These services can be used to build loyalty and drive revenues through a variety of services that give the consumer key pieces of information that makes their journey easier and upsell and marketing messages. Currently, 78.4% of travel brands that have an automated messaging service report that they can send booking confirmations and reminders but just 37% can send post-stay marketing messages and 35% emergency notifications. We can expect the number of travel brands with automated outreach to grow in 2018 alongside the type and content of their messages. Brands will take on a multichannel strategy with their messaging, using the most appropriate format for the customer based on where they are in the journey. For example, SMS for a change in gate, or push notifications from an app for excursions at the destination.  

3.      Mobile sites will become better at grabbing the last-minute booking

Although mobile is a fast-growing channel when it comes to the booking itself, desktops and laptops still rule the roost when it comes to share and even more so when it comes to spending. Instead, mobile appears to still be a last-minute channel, especially for hotels. Just under 65% of respondents from all verticals in the survey say that mobile lead times are either much shorter or slightly shorter than desktop bookings, with 40% answering that they are much shorter. Nearly double the rate of respondents from the accommodation group report that mobile lead times are much shorter – 59% to 31%.

This makes the mobile web experience critical, as smaller screens and a need for swift information will make relevancy and presentation critical. In our survey 39% of brands reported that they were prioritizing the mobile web and a further 6%, said they were shifting to mobile web, far above those who said they were prioritizing apps. We can expect the number of travel brands who have a responsive or adaptive website to rise from the 58% who currently do.

Optimizing this experience will be driven by growing abilities to personalize landing pages and streamlining the moments from arrival on the site to the check-out based off growing data analysis capabilities and A/B testing. Furthermore, advances in revenue management and yield maximization techniques will increase the profitability of last-minute mobile bookings.

To access the research and get ahead of the competition, download this completely free mobile market report to access:

• A major industry survey of all travel verticals uncovering their mobile strategies and technology deployments.
• Analysis of how consumers are using the mobile channel.
• Projections for mobile’s growth across travel.
• Where you should be investing to reach the mobile consumer.
• How you can ensure mobile-focused communications are effective.
• An overview of how you should be measuring and overseeing an m-commerce operation.

Hotels need to do better at reaching guests finds report

Hotel brands are seeing lower satisfaction rates from their mobile efforts according to EyeforTravel’s new report, likely as a result of not being able to reach guests as effectively as other verticals through the channel.

As part of EyeforTravel and SAP Digital Interconnect’s new Driving Intelligent, Interconnected Mobile Engagement Throughout the Travel Journey report, an industry survey asked whether mobile messaging services were effective at driving satisfaction amongst customers. While 72% of hospitality and accommodation brands said that their messaging services were effective, a much higher 90% of respondents from other travel industry verticals reported success through messaging. 

But why is this? The report points out that one potential explanation is that hospitality brands are utilizing the most personalized and effective elements of messaging channels to a lesser degree than other verticals. This is leading to them not getting the maximum utility out of their messaging services and not building up the same relationship with their customers than other companies surveyed.

The research finds that although hotel brands are good at pushing booking confirmations and welcome/check-in messages to travelers, they fall behind when it comes to more complex and data-reliant messages. Hospitality brands are using push notification at half the rate of the rest of the sample (35.3% versus 16.7%), despite 31% of accommodation companies having an app, and are way behind for upsell notifications, with just 32.3% of messaging-capable hospitality brands sending personalized upsell messages versus 51.2% for the remaining respondents. They therefore have less ability to become useful to the consumer and implant themselves with travelers as a trusted source of local information.

Hospitality brands low deployment of push-notifications is illustrative of this mismatch, as push notifications were found by the survey to be by far the most effective form of in-app advertising. Push notifications were chosen as the most effective form by 44% of respondents, followed by display banners at 25%, videos at 15%, native display at 14% and interstitial at 3%. Therefore, without these capabilities, hotels cannot communicate.

Hospitality and accommodation companies therefore need to build up their technological capabilities in order to reach out to consumers wherever they are with relevant and targeted messages.

“Brands need to be present where the customer is present, rather than forcing people to pick the channels or means or tools that the brands want them to use,” says Rohit Tripathi, general manager and head of products, SAP Digital Interconnect. “Today, if your customer is residing in social channels such as Facebook Messenger or WeChat, then build bridges into these mediums.”

Amro Khoudeir, global director of digital & distribution, Mövenpick Hotels & Resorts, notes that they have deployed several tools to better cater to guests on mobile: “Before arrival we send our guests an invitation to check-in. The guest provides us with all their details and they get their barcode on the day of arrival, scan and receive a key and to go straight to their room. Post-booking, there’s an opportunity to start identifying guests who come in to the hotel through geolocation or beacons. We do some geolocation marketing and social marketing and are expanding this to more hotels in 2018.”

Get ahead of the competition now and download this completely free mobile market report to access:

• A major industry survey of all travel verticals uncovering their mobile strategies and technology deployments.
• Analysis of how consumers are using the mobile channel.
• Projections for mobile’s growth across travel.
• Where you should be investing to reach the mobile consumer.
• How you can ensure mobile-focused communications are effective.
• An overview of how you should be measuring and overseeing an m-commerce operation. 

Travel brands are missing out on a huge revenue opportunity

More and more markets are becoming mobile-first, giving brands huge potential to reach out to travelers, but EyeforTravel and SAP Digital Interconnect’s new free mobile market report finds that brands are missing out by failing to reach consumers on their smartphones.

Creating a mobile messaging strategy is effective, so why aren’t more brands doing it asks EyeforTravel and SAP Digital Interconnect’s new Driving Intelligent, Interconnected Mobile Engagement Throughout the Travel Journey report? The research, which is free to download now, shows that 83% of travel brands that have automated messaging services find that they are effective at increasing customer satisfaction. However, just 41% of brands surveyed report that they currently have these services, although a further 20% report that they are also developing the capability to do so. 

Delving deeper into the deployment of possible mobile messaging routes, a similar story emerges of a lack of communication routes between brands and travelers. Just under a third of brands reported that they had developed an app, 29% could reach customers with mobile messaging or push notifications and just under a quarter can send SMS texts. This leaves the majority of travel brands bereft of ways in which to communicate directly to travelers’ smartphones, aside from through email, but even in this field, only 40.4% of respondents said they use mobile-optimised email.

This mismatch leaves a huge gap that is increasingly vital for travel brands to exploit. The research notes that not only do travel consumers increasingly resort to mobile as they research their trip and as they journey, but also they are actively interested in being reached. 87% of US travelers said that they find travel notifications useful, with trip status updates the most popular but also discounts and pricing widely sought after. 

Therefore, travel brands are missing out on better performance in two ways says the research: Firstly, they are largely unable to cross- and upsell the consumer travel products, as well as less able to accommodate last-minute mobile bookings, hitting revenue directly. Secondly, they are missing out on a key means to drive loyalty with the consumer, as smart mobile messaging allows a relationship to be built.

This latter point can be done through a number of ways, such as making the customer’s journey more convenient, sending personalized messages, responding appropriately in moments of crisis, and creating an easier means to gather feedback and encourage reviews.

“Only the travel brand knows if you made a change to your flight or PNR, so in terms of loyalty why should a travel brand acquiesce that relationship to Google?” says Michael Bayle, head of mobile at Amadeus. “It should be them bringing these things to the attention of the traveler. The more current and actionable data, such as a flight cancellation, Google can’t act upon. The travel brand can make a positive change to get a result and take advantage of that disruptive management.”

However, to make the most out of mobile, it isn’t enough to simply deploy an app or an SMS service. Travel brands need to create an overarching mobile strategy. “For the traveler, there are no mobile stages. Mobile is everything and everything is mobile. We interact in making our purchase decisions seamlessly on our tablet and phones, and sometimes on our computers, so it is no longer fair to call out mobile as a separate category. It is no longer a case of ‘do you have a mobile strategy?’ Instead it’s ‘What are you doing to embed that deeper into the consumer lifecycle or purchase journey?’ says Rohit Tripathi, general manager and head of products, SAP Digital Interconnect.

Tripathi also notes that this needs to be contextual and appropriate to the consumer’s situation. “If it’s a general update or information about an upcoming promotion that is not immediately relevant, then email is the best way to reach out, or social media. If it is something critical that needs to be acted on, such as a change of travel plans, an unexpected disruption or threat, then SMS is clearly the way to go. You can safely rely on SMS to be available globally whether or not the person has a data plan,” he explains.

“When our customers reach out using SAP Intelligent Notification 365’s unique multi-channel API they can do so across communication channels either on-device, social media or on a brand app. Therefore, they can maintain two-way transactional or marketing engagement that matches the customer’s needs through an autonomous system that enables and escalates message routing across all mobile channels.”

Get ahead of the competition now and download this completely free mobile market report to access:

• A major industry survey of all travel verticals uncovering their mobile strategies and technology deployments.
• Analysis of how consumers are using the mobile channel.
• Projections for mobile’s growth across travel.
• Where you should be investing to reach the mobile consumer.
• How you can ensure mobile-focused communications are effective.
• An overview of how you should be measuring and overseeing an m-commerce operation.