When it comes to personalizing the sale of travel products, there is personalization and then there is "hyperpersonalization": knowing and satisfying the specific tastes and whims of the traveler, from the temperature they prefer in the hotel room to the seat they prefer in the plane.
Hyperpersonalization goes beyond standard personalization strategies and involves a new style of segmentation based on leveraging never-before-seen amounts of data. Many of them in real time.
What is the benefit for travel brands that achieve this? Martin Eade, of travel search and booking technology provider Vibe, believes the stakes are high. "It's the holy grail of personalization and the first company to achieve it will have a real advantage. After all, why would customers switch from a hotel or airline that can anticipate their needs before they even know them? ?
You may be wondering what kind of technology is needed to make this work. Rubén Sánchez, CEO of the leading hotel revenue management platform BEONx, explains that the more able travel companies are to improve their knowledge of their guests through data analysis, the easier it will be to design hyper-personalized experiences that adapt to the needs of their guests. specific needs of each guest. "The goal is to create strategies that make each guest feel special and unique, rather than feeling like a faceless member of a generic market segment." But before companies can achieve hyper-personalization, they need to shift their focus from product to customer, developing a customer-centric strategy. "Leveraging data will help them know exactly who their customers are, how they behave, and what they expect when they come to stay at a hotel or travel on a particular airline."
It is clear that this success depends on accessing data about the customer to anticipate their needs and one way to get closer to achieving this is by offering subscription services, thus obtaining more information about the user. Janis Dzenis of travel comparison website WayAway - which also offers a subscription service - points out that "getting consumers to share their data is often difficult, but if they are subscribers and therefore registered and using search tools on your platform frequently, you learn more about their needs. This makes it easier to select and book travel experiences that are most attractive to them. And this is just the beginning, we are excited about what the future holds."
Another way AI can enable hyper-personalization is through automation. Adam Harris, co-founder and CEO of Cloudbeds, the hospitality technology platform that enables more bookings and happier guests for independent accommodation companies around the world, believes this is the case in the hospitality sector and notes that tools AI-powered automation solutions will relieve hoteliers in new and interesting ways. "Rapid, valuable 'recipes' for automation will enable hoteliers to create predictable and reliable processes, so they can take their hands off keyboards and create more unique human-to-human interactions. At Cloudbeds, we're building a world where AI-powered automations check out guests, trigger emails for last-minute reservations, add notes for housekeeping when a VIP guest arrives, and create detailed reports with insights to help make better decisions. be less manual, your guests' personalized experience will skyrocket.
Hyper-personalization is also likely to lead to greater accuracy and optimization in areas such as pricing. Koert Grasveld, Vice President of Payments at B2B travel payments company Terrapay, says businesses need to prepare themselves with the right technologies when it comes to impacting their billing payments. "What is needed are smart payment solutions that can cope with real-time, complex and micro-scale price changes, not only on the consumer side, but also on the B2B settlement side. There are currently many technologies that can help automate and save money, as well as improve accuracy."
But will this really happen in 2024? Or soon? Gareth Matthews, Marketing Director at global travel distribution provider Didatravel, believes the industry could finally be in a position to offer such features to travelers by 2024. "Thanks to the huge explosion in artificial intelligence capabilities, It is now possible to analyze large amounts of data instantly, including travel history, preferences, social media activity and demographic information, to identify new patterns and understand individual traveler preferences better than ever. medium term is undoubtedly very promising".
Finally, Craig Everett, founder and CEO of Holibob, a provider of experience technology for tourism boards and online travel sellers, says that hyper-personalization could give rise to a related new trend: hyper-localization. "These new technologies not only allow travel companies to understand the traveler better, but also facilitate a deeper contextual understanding of their interests in relation to the destination. This has the opportunity to unlock a level of hyperlocal and hyper-relevant online recommendations that could ultimately propel the experiences sector online, opening up a huge opportunity for every travel brand to capitalize on the $250 billion opportunity that is the experiences market, meeting travelers where they are, when they are ready to reserve."
Fuente: Belvera Partners.