5 Travel Trends Shaping the Future of Digital Experience

Summary

The global travel industry faces a unique set of challenges driven by distinct industry trends. Travel professionals must satisfy the needs of passengers and guests both in person and online, in real time and across multiple languages. That means ensuring a seamless, consistent experience across channels and interactions. To achieve this, travel professionals must continuously monitor travel and digital trends and adjust their approach accordingly. This paper explores the five key trends impacting the digital experience in travel, enabling you to better understand how they impact your business.

The Silent Traveler

“Across the entire customer journey, every touchpoint is a brand experience and an opportunity to engage the consumer – and digital touchpoints just keep multiplying.”

– McKinsey, Digitizing the Consumer Decision Journey

“…Digital channels no longer just represent ‘a cheaper way’ to interact with customers; they are critical for executing promotions, stimulating sales, and increasing market share.” – McKinsey, Digitizing the Consumer Decision Journey

Evolving the site experience to meet the needs of today’s travelers

Millennials, tech-savvy X and Y generations from around the world and modern consumers alike are using digital tools to jump across industry-defined silos. They move seamlessly from tourism sites, such as destination marketing organizations (DMOs) and online travel agencies (OTAs), to tour operators to hotel and airline booking tools – without ever stopping to ask for directions. It’s the ultimate in hospitality ironies – with the ascent of the silent digital traveler, real human service and interactions fade in importance.

But even as omnichannel strategy takes precedence over eye contact in the digital era, some channels are more profitable than others. For example, hotels, airlines and tour operators sell directly as well as resell on OTAs, and they must budget to service all of these channels. Depending on your go-to-market strategy, the trick is to garner travelers’ attention long enough on any one channel for them to book through your channel of choice. That way you increase profit margins while enhancing travelers’ experiences.

To fully capitalize on this opportunity, travel organizations need to offer an online experience that delivers the same great level of hospitality that their physical properties provide. Achieving this requires alignment with visitor expectations, offering a rich, contextual experience in the traveler’s language and on the device of their choosing. Moreover, brands need to excel at offering cross-channel convenience, as travelers gather information on one channel, book on another and expect service on yet another. Being everywhere is not as important as being relevant. But that’s not all – brands must ensure the third-party OTA sites presenting their information satisfy travelers in the same way.

Top 5 DX Trends

Silent Traveler

• Travelers are no longer speaking up and are voicing their concerns online without saying a word.
• Travelers who use digital tools to jump across industrydefined silos, no longer need human hand-holding.
• The hospitality paradox: as human service becomes less important with the rise of the digital traveler.

Curation Comes to Travel Listings

• With so many hotel rooms, airline seats and restaurants to choose from organizing offerings is critical.
• Travelers are overwhelmed by choices online: mobile is creating a need for a better curated experience.
• Sellers must deliver targeted and personalized information to travelers using data.

Optimizing Guest Social Amplification

• User-generated content (UGC) gains position as the #1 destination differentiator
• Visuals are the new language of the digital era. Travel is uniquely suited to visual media.
• Consumers value the opinion of others more than any marketing speak.

Innovative Disruption Turns to Collaboration

• Uber and Airbnb are mainstream, now they must go legit.
• Disrupters will evolve from sharing to collaboration.
• With everyone trying to standout by being innovative the successful companies will collaborate.

Metasearch

• Travel metasearch will proliferate as Priceline acquired Kayak, Expedia bought Trivago and TripAdvisor rounded out its user reviews with a hotel comparison shopping engine.
• Consumers will view OTA metasearch as an efficient way to get a quick view of the market.

Curation of Travel Listings

Collecting and cataloging destination listings

With so many hotel rooms, airline seats and restaurant tables to choose from, it’s critical for brands to optimize their offerings. Travelers are overwhelmed by choices online. Plus, mobile is creating a need for a better curated experience. An increasing amount of choices need to be served up in a format that encourages travelers to remain on their buying journey with your brand – whatever the screen size and connection speed.

By using data collected online about travelers, sites can deliver targeted information that consumers crave. Showing images of properties, details about amenities and so on, based on the traveler’s demographics, navigation choices and other digital clues, is the first step to delivering a curated experience. This takes the burden off the traveler of trawling through countless images and descriptions to find what interests them. For example, travelers seeking luxury couples-only vacation rentals can skip wading through countless listings of family-friendly properties to focus on the high-end, all-inclusive resort that fits their needs.

In an ideal world – and using the right tools – curation mostly happens algorithmically. In other words, websites serve up information automatically to each site visitor based on a set of predefined parameters.

Deliver multimedia

If a picture is worth a thousand words, video is probably worth a million. Travelers don’t want to just read about a destination or travel option – they want to immerse themselves in it, getting a true feel for what they will experience, ensuring there are no nasty surprises. To that end, multimedia and particularly video plays an important role in attracting, engaging and converting global travelers.

Octoly reports

that on average, user-generated videos about a brand were viewed 10 times more often than official brand videos on YouTube. And according to YouTube, 80% of posted content comes from outside the United States

The key is to deliver a multimedia experience quickly and in the customer’s language; otherwise, travelers will navigate away from the site and the brand. Studies show that nearly 50% of consumers expect a webpage to load in two seconds or less. It should come as no surprise what Amazon found when it correlated its web performance to online sales: for every page load delay of 100 milliseconds, conversions declined by 1%.

By using intelligent listings to attract and serve up relevant, compelling content, brands can convert site visitors and drive measurable growth.

89 Million people are expected to watch online videos today (Comscore)

Globally, online video traffic will be 55% of all consumer internet traffic in 2016 (Cisco)

Online video now accounts for 50% of all mobile traffic (Bytermobile Mobile Analytics Report)

2 Billion video views per week are mobilized on YouTube (YouTube)

Optimizing Guests’ Social Amplification

Tap into user-generated content

The amount of user-generated content being created today is growing exponentially. Consider that SDL alone collects over 85 million conversations a day – 59% in non-English languages – for our Customer Journey Analytics dashboard.

The potential for leveraging user-generated content for travel and hospitality brands is significant. In a recent study by New York University’s Preston Robert Tisch Center for Hospitality and Tourism and TrustYou, 513 respondents were provided with simulated booking engines, each displaying three fictional hotels with high, medium and low prices ranging from $100 per night to $120 per night, as well as varying average review scores. The study revealed that given equal prices, travelers are 3.9 times more likely to choose a hotel with higher review scores. In fact, 76% said they would pay more for a hotel with higher than average review scores.

What this implies is that if travelers discover positive reviews, they are far more likely to choose your brand. You could try to hire every translator in the world in every language to translate 85 million conversations a day, but that seems a bit excessive. Machine translation technology is a far more viable and cost-effective option for translating user reviews – especially if the machine translation engine is pre-trained and pre-populated with travel and hospitality terminology. A well-trained machine translation engine is not only highly accurate, it can help brands avoid ambiguity.

Leading travel brands use social analytics tools to analyze usergenerated content, such as online reviews, and convert them into actionable metrics and insights that guide their business decisions. In this way, they turn their websites and social media outlets into powerful research tools, using data-driven insight to create compelling messaging, content, products and loyalty programs personalized for each market.

For example, if a cruise line notices that guests staying in balcony cabins give the brand a higher rating on review sites, it may decide to add more rooms with balconies. Or when an airline sees travelers raving about a certain food item on its in-flight menu, it may add that item to additional routes or more flights.

What is a comfort pet? The U.S. Department of Transportation allows people to travel with animals for emotional support or comfort. However, the concept of a “comfort pet” is truly foreign in other parts of the world. This makes it challenging to translate the official policies for airlines such as Air France, British Airways, Japan Airlines, and Virgin Atlantic – all of whom accept comfort pets on international flights.

The number of reviews on TripAdvisor grew from over 100 million in 2013 to over 200 million in 2014.7

Disruption Turns to Collaboration

Master mobile now

Mobile-first innovation is disrupting traditional online channels. Just as social sharing has been embraced in the travel industry, disruptive models are evolving, encouraging collaboration. Consider the examples of peer-to-peer travel service providers Uber and Airbnb. By creating a ‘sharing economy,’ they are disrupting traditional central reservations systems of accommodation and taxi companies. Disrupters will continue to appear as the market figures out new and better ways of using all available resources. In much the same way, travel companies must incorporate mobile technology and behaviors into their strategy.

Increasingly, travelers research and look up information about their trips via mobile devices, whether on their smartphones, tablets or a kiosk in the airport or at a destination. In fact, PhoCusWright research shows that 25% of all travel bookings in the US will occur via smartphones in 2015.

The way travel suppliers interact with customers before, during and after their trips needs to keep pace with innovation. Travelers are mixing business with pleasure and mobile devices are the catalysts for this trend. As a result, responsive design should be a priority. This includes integrating booking functionality into mobile offerings, and addressing multiple display and connection speeds for varying devices when coping with volume and velocity of information consumption. In other words, travel companies must deliver new ways for traveler’s to have a self-guided journey that converts across multiple mobile devices.

All of this gives travelers more control over their experience. Whether they are ordering room service while in a meeting or booking a flight on the way to the airport, they can choose how their experience will unfold from a device that they can carry in their pocket. However, the real opportunity is how travel brands collaborate using mobile solutions. How can your guests share local experiences through your mobile app, even if those experiences are not directly affiliated with your hotel or brand? Think about airboat tours of the Everglades from the Mandarin Oriental in Miami or trips to the top of the highest building in the world – the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Thinking outside the box can make your trips truly memorable experiences. By engaging your guests on the devices they spend the most time on, you are able to deliver memories that last a lifetime.

25% of all travel bookings in the US will occur via smartphones in 2015.

Metasearch

Digital experience optimization

As consumers seek an efficient way to make sense of the market, travel metasearch will grow. No wonder Priceline acquired Kayak, Expedia bought Trivago and TripAdvisor rounded out its user reviews with a hotel-comparison shopping engine.

There’s good reason that this is one of the fastest-moving trends: according to digital researchers L2, 39% of Millennials source their travel via metasearch rather than traditional online travel agencies (OTAs) or brand site navigation. This means that travel brands must think beyond travel listings and factor in the need to communicate in a cultural context to deliver on global traveler expectations. Localizing search results – both internal and on engines such as Google and Yahoo – is one such way to deliver a more native experience to the consumer. To achieve this in multiple languages requires search term translation in metadata. For instance, “comfort” in one culture may mean a well-appointed large room, while in another it may mean a soft bed in a cozy room. True localization must consider multilingual search capabilities, in-site, in-app and with third-party search engines.

At the same time, brands need to incorporate global SEO best practices. Google no longer ranks websites based on just on keywords, links and content. It also considers the site visitor experience along with social signals and footprints. In essence, Google determines how well brands are delivering value to their audience based on how often their content is viewed and shared in the social channels.

According to McKinsey, companies must adopt a different approach to managing the consumer decision journey, focusing on three areas:

Discover:

Analyze customer behaviors and experiences with the brand, along with signals in customer mobile and social media data, to develop engagement strategies.

Design:

Craft a compelling and tailored customer experience that aligns with each stage of the decision journey.

Deliver:

Ensure cross-functional teams collaborate and communicate to engage travelers personally at every point of the customer journey.

How to put this insight to work

Winning in today’s marketplace requires travel brands to deliver on these trends. This is no small feat, as one trend adds to the complexity of the next. This is further compounded by the fact that travel companies must address these trends on their own sites as well as on the third-party sites presenting information about their brands.

Here are a few actionable steps every travel brand can take:

Just as travelers are sharing resources, share these trends with third-party providers and resellers to drive an engagement experience that is collaborative as well as profitable for all.

Implement a solid customer experience management strategy that ties what you are doing online to the experiences that you are creating in real life. Integrate innovative tools and tactics to reach individual travelers throughout their journey.

Analyze the customer journey and your company’s own objectives to localize experiences, increasing engagement and conversion. The infrastructure required to enable that can take many forms, but should include web-based technologies that help brands manage web content, contextual relevance and localization.

For more on the technologies underpinning today’s successful travel companies, call us to discuss your needs or to set up a one-day, in-house customer experience evaluation.

You can also visit http://www.sdl.com/industry/travel