Unlocking the Potential of Data-Driven Insights in the Travel Industry

Rethinking customer touchpoints

The travel industry in Asia has undergone a significant transformation in recent years, with the rise of technology and data-driven insights contributing to the modernization of the customer experience. From personalized services to streamlined booking processes and enhanced experiences across all touchpoints, travel brands are leveraging technology to create a competitive advantage and provide customers with a memorable travel experience, such as creating customized travel itineraries, integrating leisure and business travel packages, or providing sustainable accommodations to create and develop value for travelers.

With the travel industry’s recovery set in motion and the shift toward digitalization, it only makes sense for travel brands to tap into and utilize key data metrics to better tailor their audience reach, marketing, and services offered for successful tractions and, ultimately, conversions.

In response, travel brands are heavily investing in the latest technologies to complement data compilations and utility to forge the ultimate traveler experience and dominate the emerging target market by walking the traveler through each step from booking to departure. Today’s day and age requires a custom, tailored approach to build a solid traveler base.

In this article, we explore how two of the juggernaut travel brands, Expedia and Booking.com, in Asia were able to optimize, personalize and modernize the traveler experience, covering the following key discussion areas:

• How the travel brands leveraged collaborations with partners
• Leading brands setting the industry standard and its impact on the future of the traveler experience
• Challenges faced alongside partners

Here is how they soared for the opportunity and transformed it into the competitive advantage they harnessed to this day.

Next-Level Partnerships

In modern travel, travel brands today should recognize the immense potential in partnerships (existing or new) with accommodations, airports, airlines, lodging, and transport services, to name a few, that complement their service offerings. Hence, travel brands can then tailor the right message and offer at the right time by exchanging insights and value offered between travel and travel-associated brands through harnessing technology and compiling data.

Expedia

Like other travel brands, Expedia is tapping into the gradual potential of Asia’s travel industry recovery despite economic instability. To enable this, Expedia has leveraged partnerships with destination management organizations, airlines, airports, and lodging partners through knowledge-sharing enabled by qualitative insights from partners and complemented by Expedia’s own First-Party Data.

For instance, Expedia uses first-party data to create value for hotels in Asia that have unsold rooms and want to increase occupancy to prevent low-volume periods. Specifically, Expedia's first-party data on traveler searches and booking patterns provides hotels with actionable insights and recommendations to help fill their unsold rooms. By using this data to optimize hotel inventory and pricing strategies, Expedia helps increase hotel occupancy rates while offering travelers competitive rates and a wide selection of options.

“All linked to data and visibility – this is where the vendors are supported. It all starts with tracking. Proofing how you optimise it.” - Jeff Baars, Chief Commercial Officer, Urban Rest Apartment

Doing so helped the travel brand pinpoint its target market and identify the opportunities it could grasp by developing strategic outreach initiatives, including marketing messages, social media platforms used, and service offerings to meet and strive to exceed the traveler’s standards. For instance, Expedia has identified single adult travelers as the primary target as they have seen a 15% increase in travelers from the US looking to travel to destinations including Japan, Thailand, and Vietnam.

The synergy between fostering partnership relationships and vital data-driven insights benefits the esteemed traveler and enables partners to better understand consumer behavior and trends, such as the most active times of the day, averaging search window lengths, and qualitative feedback from travelers through partner-generated surveys. This enables additional, foundational context to make more informed decisions as they tweak their strategies.

Booking.com

Booking.com is well-known for its innovative approach to travel accommodations. The company has been leveraging partnerships in Asia to further tailor its offerings to the needs of travelers in the region. By investing in major Chinese digital services such as Trip.com Group, Meituan, and Didi Chuxing, Booking.com has gained access to a broader range of services it can offer its customers.

By partnering with local companies, Booking.com has expanded its reach and offered a more personalized experience to its customers in Asia. These partnerships allow Booking.com to tap into the expertise of local companies and provide travelers with a more authentic and culturally immersive experience.

Resultingly, Booking.com was able to capitalize on trends within the travel industry, such as revenge travel, where leisure trips are now converged with business trips due to the dynamic changes remote work has enabled for worldwide businesses, where travelers seem to be staying longer in their travel destinations. Another trend found was the growing awareness and emphasis on opting for sustainable travel offerings, as travelers today are placing more value in engaging with environmental initiatives throughout their travel experience.

In response, Booking.com launched its award-winning Booking Explorer’s Campaign, which aims to reignite inspiration for travel among travelers with a focus on where travelers want to venture to, how they want to travel and provide them the opportunity to do so through giving hand-picked service offerings from booking flights, accommodations and activities based on their preferences.

“Spending more time looking at data and search – addressing it more with more personalization – more relevant content.” - Tony Chow, Global Director - Content Marketing and Marketing Partnerships, Hong Kong Tourism Board

Additionally, Booking.com also launched the Travel Sustainable badge, a globally relevant sustainability measure that recognizes properties with impactful sustainability practices in five key areas: waste, energy and greenhouse gases, water, supporting local communities, and protecting nature

Booking.com’s findings show that 73% of guests are more likely to book at a property with sustainability practices in place. The program is designed to champion the efforts of their partners and bring sustainability-minded travelers closer to properties that are making an effort to be more sustainable. The badge helps travelers easily identify and choose sustainable accommodations, which can contribute to reducing their carbon footprint and preserving the environment. Hence, knitting the link between the traveler’s value to the travel brand’s, which builds trust toward retaining a loyal customer base.

As the traveler's needs and wants evolve with the travel environment, so has the mode of travel to accommodate those needs and wants, incentivizing the importance of gauging with partners specializing in emerging segments, especially in transport. Companies like Gojek, Grab, and Uber have redefined the traveler commute experience as an alternative to hefty taxi prices as travelers now rely on these apps to navigate parts of their trip.

However, travel brands must do their due diligence before joining a new partnership to ensure their strategic objectives align and enhance the service value created for travelers. Before diving into a partnership or two, we compiled a criteria list as a reference point.