The Ten Biggest “Data” Questions Travel Organisations Are Dealing With Right Now

I've spent the last six months talking to business travel executives from across the spectrum- marketing, pricing, performance strategy, analytics, IT, CRM and more. Despite the breadth of job roles, they all have one thing in common. Every single one of the professionals I spoke to is dealing with copious amounts of internal DATA. Data management and analytics tracking is a growing part of every travel business- from loyalty to marketing, from pricing to CRM, from performance strategy to business intelligence and forecasting. In celebration of the rise and rise of data into our working lives, I have clustered together the ten biggest issues reported from major airlines, hotels, car hire firms, OTAs, destinations and tour operators working in this space:

1.   It’s Mine, Hands Off: Data sharing. Oh the woes. Who owns the right to the data within your organisation? This has been an issue since the cows left and never came home. Should everyone have access to pricing, loyalty and CRM data? Who is managing this and ensuring data is preserved and used correctly?  
2. System of A Down: System consolidation. We've been discussing this in revenue management and pricing for years. What happens when you try to integrate CRM with pricing, and is the technology even really there yet? Similarly, what happens in a coalition or partnership situation like for example with United and Continental last year?
3. Big (very, very, terrifying, huge, scary, why is everyone shouting about it) Data: Big data is splashed all over the news in every sector of business. Why so? Because in the last two years, the ability to capture specific types of data has moved along leaps and bounds. What’s the result? A huge tidal wave of data that only a fair few know how to fully use.
4. The Tech Check:   With a huge surge in data and analytics technologies now on the market, who can you trust and where should you put your dollars?
5.  If You Plan It, They Will Come: This issue looks at identifying key contributors and factors to help you plan better for the future. Where are the growth markets, who are the key customers and how can you maximize profit?
6. One Size Doesn’t Fit Them All: Our peers found that segmentation is back on the hit list. With the breadth of our data capabilities widening, our segmentation and targeting strategies should be more personalized than ever before, yet many travel businesses still don’t segment marketing data as efficiently as they could do.
7. The Tick-Tock- Real Time Data: The casinos have been at it for years, so why isn’t everyone else? The opportunities with real-time data are truly unreal- so how do you action it and reap the benefits? What is the technology and cost involved?
8.  The Social Commotion:  Learning how to effectively measure, react and respond to social customers. Plus, how do you legally pull data from Facebook, Twitter and more and use that information intelligently to make sales?
9. Ain’t No Data Up In Here: One of the points which many of our interviewees brought up is the internal struggle to ensure that data is at the core of the business. Getting the board level to wholly back forecasting, planning and performance strategy is an on-going problem, despite it being based on analytical fact.
10. Recruit if they know the word Hadoop? Recruitment of data and analytics professionals is one of the trickiest things we have to deal with in the travel industry. Finding someone who is a “power user,” or a “data scientist,” (when the interviewer is not) can be hard. What should you be looking for? Where can you find them?

So to conclude, it is safe to say there are a number of challenges and opportunities in the data and analytics space. One thing that is for certain is that the role of data and analytics is present in all the stages of travel: dreaming, booking, experiencing and reporting. I’m looking forward to hosting a group of travel analytics professionals in NYC next January to discuss some of these prevalent issues.  If you want more information, you can see www.eyefortravel.com/analytics. 

Missed EyeforTravel Amsterdam last week? Here's the Twitter wrap-up

Super Trends and Takeaways from TDS N. America 2012

As the dust settles from the industry maelstrom that descended on Las Vegas for EyeforTravel’s 13th TDS N. America summit, what better way to round-up two action packed days, 90+ presentations and 4 distinct conferences than a good ol’ slapdash blog post?

Despite flooding causing Maccarran airport to close the day before the event and the Obama campaign dropping in to keep the journey interesting for traveling delegates, the summit pulled in 500+ attendees from all industry sectors and corners of the globe. Below are the most salient topics to emerge;

Personalization and Continuous Improvement of the Guest / User Experience perhaps unsurprisingly took front and centre for in many a debate.

Greg Land of IBM cited that 88% of CEOs surveyed by IBM this year reported their top priority within the next five years was to get closer to their consumers. Nor1’s Sanjay Wahi reinforced this impetus by highlighting how real-time data management can be leveraged to create hyper-personalised, relevant and lucrative ancillary offerings to the high intent traveller on the fly. Wahi demonstrated how this strategy created a 25% average increase in original booking value for upgraded bookings with travel brands. Still more staggering was the fact that analyzing transactional data and booking patterns enabled them to lift conversion rates by 15-20%.

Mobile is key to this approach, reports MMGY’s Claire Bishop as our smartphones are now such an inherently personal possession, they represent a perfect opportunity to serve customers as a personal concierge to drive incredible customer service and user experiences. Claire also went on to liken customer engagement to ‘a courtship’ in that brands shouldn’t be doing all the talking but rather should listen, take their input to heart and respond accordingly to create a message that really resonates with them and people who are like them.

HotelTonight CEO Sam Shank resonated with mobile being ideal tool for unprecedented personalisation and building real loyalty.  

“If they had a great experience, they will go back to the app and concrete loyalty is won, time and time again’

It’s a ratings game with hotel apps, Shank continues ‘‘But hoteliers need to remember that when guests rate an app, they are not just rating the technical aspect; they are rating the entire experience of interacting with the company. Some of the most negative reviews of hotel apps are about the support experience; your weakest link brings down your rating—even offline elements.”

So what’s the trick? ‘‘Focusing on the customer experience both online and offline will increase app ratings – People are expecting such a lousy interaction … that if we provide them with something great, we’re going to blow them away.”

The Mobile-Powered Renaissance of Last-Minute Mobile Bookings

Expedia reported that 32% of all overall hotel bookings in Las Vegas come from mobile devices. Not surprising considering the spontaneous / erratic soul of the city and weak market conditions, more interesting was the dilemma this trend creates for suppliers. Max Starkov of HeBS warned of the dangers of conditioning customers to book last-minute and at sub-optimal price levels. His argument was echoed by Minoo Patel of NIIT Technologies and IHG’s Bill Keen, both pointed out the fact that last minute travellers arriving in a new and often unfamiliar city urgently need a hotel room, so why discount and erode your rates and brand? HotelTonight’s Jared Simon, countered by explaining that rooms sold through HotelTonight can only be accessed via mobile and on the same day so these are rooms that would not otherwise be sold. ‘‘The best revenue managers will realize that an individual will have different booking needs at different times and will ensure that their hotels are in front of those bookers with a relevant offer regardless of the booking need’.

In other words, Consumers with a pre-existing allegiance to one brand or another will go through the brand’s own channel in advance to complete their reservation.  If consumers were already faithful to your hotel, they’d call ahead or visit your website first; the reason they’re on a last minute site is because you’re sold out.

On whichever side of the fence you happen to sit, the fact remains that the industry is starting to wake up to the last-minute phenomenon with the likes of Priceline, Expedia, Travelocity all entering the fray with their own same-day booking services and EU players following suit. See more Google data and trends on last-minute mobile booking here

Revenue Management Takes the Innovation Crown

Amidst stiff competition from an eminent panel of travel industry innovators, it was a scientific revenue management solution that stole the show and emerged triumphant as the EyeforTravel ‘One to Watch’ in 2013.

-Rates is an intelligent, algorithmic  pricing tool that seeks to democratize and simplify revenue management for small to mid-tier hotels who lack the time, resources and tradition of their big-budget counterparts. The tool is so simple that CEO Vadim Asadov claimed a five-year-old child could run it.  “It’s rocket science wrapped into a calculator interface’’

By using a neat combination of historical sales data, real-time competitive rates and a host of other multivariate market/demand and even human input, the system’s algorithm provides optimal pricing points and predictive analytics that Vadim reports has helped a 3 star hotel increase RevPAR by 42%, almost 30% higher than the market growth, which led to $60,000 in additional monthly revenue. Impressive and also refreshing to see revenue management rightly take its place at the industry table. 

This is a mere taste of the learnings gleaned from TDS N. America, for the attention impaired (who won’t be reading this), here is a synopsis of the hottest topics and trends from the summit in tweet form http://eyefortravelblog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/crowd-sourced-advice-from-brightest.html

We’re keen to hear your thoughts, do write in and let us know what your most useful /memorable takeaways were from the show! (Sadly no entries re networking drinks)

Until the next one!

Marco Saio

EyeforTravel Director of Global Research & Projects

Crowd Sourced Advice from the Brightest Minds in the Travel Industry

After a very successful Travel Distribution Summit North America in Las Vegas last week, we wanted to put together  insightful and informative tweets from some of the thought leaders in the industry.

How Do Travel Consumers Really Want to Engage With Your Brand via Mobile?

By Gina Baillie

Did you know that French travel consumers are 15% more likely to book via a tablet than American consumers?  Or that Americans are nearly 4 times more likely to book a hotel over a smartphone than the Dutch?

No, nor did I.  When examining how to develop a mobile strategy we tend to bundle customers into ‘Europe’ and ‘North America’ when in actual fact there are vast differences between and within these continents.

Most travel brands base their research and investment decisions on mobile penetration levels and broad sweeping mobile trends without actually having an in-depth understanding of what their customer wants.

I’ve just finished reading EyeforTravel’s new Travel Consumer Report 2012-13 in which 8,400 online travel consumers from 5 different countries were quizzed on their recent travel purchases and attitudes towards web, mobile, social media and travel brands.

The statistics which particularly stood out for me were the ones regarding mobile and tablet usage and attitudes. 

We all know that more and more customers are using mobile to access travel websites and information but we often lack information or skip over what the customer actually wants to do whilst they are on your mobile site or once they have downloaded your app. 

The report found that a whopping 50% of Dutch respondents would not use a smartphone to book travel compared with 40% of Brits and French, 35% of Americans, and 29% of Germans.   So what do they want to do?

For the Dutch using as a ticket/boarding pass was a very preferable use of a smartphone for travel, as was having a map function.   For the Brits, Americans and Germans, map functions, access to information on local activities and using as a ticket/boarding pass were the most popular reasons to use a smartphone whereas in France, using smartphones to access hotel and restaurant reviews along with the map and check in functions were most popular.

What are consumers not so willing to do on a smartphone?  Researching travel products via smartphones was the least popular travel related use of a smartphone for all countries surveyed along with actually making a travel purchase via a mobile device.

But what about the 65% of US and 71% of German customers who did say that they were willing to purchase via mobile?   Well, the willingness to purchase via a mobile is clearly still there and shouldn’t be ignored as it is likely to increase.

In terms of the travel products which consumers wished to buy via mobile, there was a roughly equal spread between countries but for Americans, booking a cruise was the least popular product to purchase via a smartphone.   This varied significantly when using tablets whereby the vacation package was the favourite travel product to purchase via a tablet in all 5 countries surveyed.

The two most popular price points for purchasing travel products via a smartphone in the US were products with a value of $201 - $500 (16% of respondents) and perhaps surprisingly products of any monetary value (17%). This same pattern was mimicked in Germany.

So what can we learn from this?  If you are planning your mobile strategy you should consider:-

•          The geographical location of your customer and the dominant mobile behaviours and attitudes of consumers in that country.  For example, given that the Dutch are the most reluctant to book via a smartphone you might want to give Dutch customers a number to call rather than spending huge amounts on complex booking systems
•          Your product type and value
•         The specific features of your mobile website/app -  consider that in most countries map functions, access to information on local activities as well as check in and boarding functions were key winners
•          Don’t bundle mobile and tablet strategies as one and the same – they require very different approaches
•         Lastly, the income and age bracket of your consumer (I’ve not had a chance to touch on this yet but stayed tuned for future posts!)

The report is packed full of key consumer stats and attitudes from the entire consumer path to purchase (and yes, I know, I’m biased but it really is very extensive!).   If you are interested in downloading the report brochure and infographics then these can be found here.

We’ll be sharing a lot more insights from the report over the coming weeks via this blog and EyeforTravel.com.  Stay tuned by signing up to EyeforTravel’s weekly newsletter on the EyeforTravel homepage.

The importance of understanding the new socially enabled ‘Visual Web’

The number of photos shared on the web is exploding.  On Facebook alone, the average number of photos uploaded per day is 300 million (and with their acquisition of Instagram, this is only set to increase!).

What does this mean for travel brands?  Well, people love taking photos of their travel experiences and as travel becomes ever-more social, they are now instantly sharing images of the every element of their travel experience across their social networks.

So what’s driving this key trend?

You may have recently seen that a recent Mintel report found Digital camera sales to have decreased by 29% over the past five years.  But as Dirk Singer, Founder of TheRabbit Agency, told listeners in a recent EyeforTravel webinar, this is due to the fact that the cameras now found on most smartphones are (arguably) just as good as entry level digital cameras.

Travellers are of course by nature on the move so the rise in smartphone cameras combined with the growth of photo sharing networks such as Instagram (80 million users), Pinterest (over 11 million unique users per week) and Flickr (500 million registered users) is fuelling the phenomenon of the new ‘visual web’ or ‘imagesphere’.

The socially-enabled visual web provides a fantastic opportunity for travel brands to reach, inspire and engage new customers.   

As the old adage says ‘a picture tells a 1,000 words’.  Images enable the new time poor travel consumer to absorb a large amount of data about your destination/hotel/airline in a short amount of time.   Combine this with the social reach – and, let’s face it, we’ve all been sat in the office and seen that dreamy image of a sun drenched pool pop-up in your friends latest status update - and you are onto a winner. 

Dirk identified this key opportunity for visual engagement early on and led both the BMI and bmibaby social media campaigns on Pinterest and Instagram respectively.

For the budget airline bmibaby, they facilitated a series of ‘instameets’ exchange programmes where Instagram community members were invited to destinations  to participate in a photo walk around their city and post and share their experiences from the day with other members of the network, producing inspiring content from cities around the world.

The representatives live photo blogged from the exchange whilst the bmibaby team reported directly from the bmibaby Instagram feed, Twitter and Facebook throughout the weekend.

The result was 50,000 unique pieces of visual content, extensive media coverage and a number of awards for the campaigns.   Not bad!

To find out more about the visual web and how you can get involved with it, you can watch Dirk’s presentation here

In addition, I’m really looking forward to Naomi Bustin’s (Senior Communication Executive at bmibaby) presentation on how to get the most out of Instagram and other emerging social networks at EyeforTravel’s Online Marketing, Mobile & Social Media in Travel Summit, 3-4 October in Amsterdam.

The visual web looks set to continue grow in importance for travel brands so get involved now!  There are a number of ways in which you can encourage your customers to share their travel experiences – especially on-site during their stay.  Ushuaia Ibiza Beach hotel is a great example 

 As usual, we’ll be keeping you up-to-date with further case studies on www.eyefortravel.com

What’s Apple Plotting?

It’s been an interesting week of power plays, Machiavellian manoeuvring and plot twists for the travel and tech world; Yahoo! pilfers a top Google exec, Apple ‘friends’ Facebook, turns its back on Google and plants a firm flag into the online travel business,  leaving many wondering just what are they up to?

After much speculation, fanfare and good ol’ fashioned rumour mongering, it now seems that Apple has crystalized their intentions towards the online travel industry by unveiling its Passbook app. This app will be built-in to the iOS 6 for next-gen Apple devices and is the latest in a series of patents linked to Apple’s much vaunted iTravel system. In essence, both enable iPhones and iPads to store all necessary travel information (identity, e-tickets, flight info & notifications) manage their trips (check-in, track luggage, receipts, frequent flyer and loyalty accounts) as well as will utilize NFC technology iWallet to purchase flights, hotels and upgrades. With all this functionality housed in a single pre-installed app in devices which command roughly 60% of the overall smartphone and tablet market, it’s easy to envisage how Apple could steal a massive chunk of the online travel pie.

In a move that mirrors Google’s 2011 dive into the online travel industry, this is a statement of intent that leaves little doubt that Apple is eager to follow suit and leap-frog Google’s hotel finder and flight search. Apple is yet to comment or even announce the iTravel project but it is safe to say this blueprint will have many a fat cat scrambling to the war room. What is less certain is exactly how Apple will pull this off and who is standing in their way.

Here are few fanciful / ill thought-out scenarios;

A company with a market cap of $600 billion could simply buy its way into the market by acquiring a major OTA, GDS or metasearch player to power search and booking capabilities or it could partner with selected suppliers and TMCs who would be eager to tap into Apple’s enormous global consumer base. Providing inventory to iTravel would earn brands unprecedented visibility and allow them to slash their app development and marketing costs as well as reduce dependency on the big G and other intermediaries. But at what cost? iTravel would essentially be akin to partnering with Priceline or Expedia and will likely come with a hefty commission fees and stringent pricing terms and conditions. 

Any airline or Hotelier would also be loath to surrender their hard earned/bought customers to yet another intermediary but they might not have the choice as iTravel is a far more elegant ‘all-in-one’ travel tool which will be pre-loaded into all iOS devices, starting with the launch of the iPhone 5 this autumn. Even more brilliant is the fact that Passbook will be available by download on all ipads and from iPhone 3s onwards. That means that in one fell swoop, Apple will be able to launch the app service to it’s 370 million iOS customers, most of who’s payment details they will already own.

Another interesting turn is Apple collaborating with popular consumer websites such as Yelp and OpenTable for the next version of Siri Search. This in effect will provide a socially contextualized alternative to Google search and Voice Search and reinforce Siri as a trusted concierge and go-to resource for ‘casual search’.

Perhaps more indicative of the growing cold war between the former allies is the exclusion of Google maps and Streetview from iOS 6. Apple has taken great pains to replace this with its own cartography and geo-location technology called Flyover view (allegedly powered by TomTom) which boasts turn by turn directions as well as traffic warnings, weather notifications and travel advice. With the iPhone 5 Apple has not just kicked Google out the party, it has also jumped into bed with mutual rival Facebook, presumably to cosy up with the company’s 800 million active users. The iPhone 5 will be heavily integrated with Facebook to make it easier to share contacts, photos, calendars, music via Spotify and all the other social bells and whistles. With the budding NFC and mobile advertising industries poised for huge growth, the stakes could not be higher, or more lucrative.

What is clear is that under new CEO Tim Cook, Apple is headed in a bold and ambitious new direction that will have many travel companies rubbing their palms, scratching their heads - or banging them on a the nearest wall. I’d be very interested to hear some industry perspectives of this so do please weigh-in and let us know - Apple: Friend of Foe?

By Marco Saio

Director of International Research & Projects

EyeforTravel Ltd

Direct Line London (GMT): 0044 20 7375 7219

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