The travel and hospitality industry thrives on moments that matter, with the goal of turning a transactional and price-sensitive customer into a loyal, lifelong guest. Creating these moments doesn’t happen by chance. They’re built over time with seamless customer experiences, personalized touchpoints, and data-driven strategies. Let's explore how your brand can convert one-time bookings into lasting relationships.

For more in-depth insights, check out Destination loyalty: Creating lasting connections in travel and hospitality, which explores how travel and hospitality brands can leverage modern marketing technologies to craft journeys that resonate.

 

Simplify the journey and make it easy for customers to work with your brand  

 

Getting customers to make the actual reservation is where you win or lose them – potentially forever. To encourage conversions, you need to offer customers the simplest possible journey from browsing to booking, whether it’s on a PC, tablet, or smartphone. But making each interface work simply, seamlessly, and reliably is a major challenge. First, brands need enough touchpoints to ask for customer data to keep them engaged and pull them through the entire customer journey. Then, brands need to offer a seamless journey across platforms so that someone browsing on their phone can easily complete their booking process later in the day from their laptop. And while this can be a challenge, it’s an experience today’s customers have come to expect.

To make the experience engaging for customers, brands must be able to gather data at important touchpoints that can help them hyper-personalize, while making the experience as easy as possible, and keep customers coming back for more. While there are many digital challenges facing the travel industry, most of them boil down to how well brands will be able to immediately capitalize on the moments that matter with their customers.

For example, if a customer is having issues with their booking and speaking to customer support, behavior analytics could help the team guide them more effectively. Another example would be ensuring your brand updates customers in real time when a change occurs that will affect their experience. Building loyalty means providing timely updates and communications to customers on the channels they use most. When it comes to travel, unexpected changes in an itinerary can be frustrating enough, but if there’s a significant change or last-minute cancellation that you have not immediately made clear, the result could be unhappy customers. 

Leveraging MarTech can help create a personalized and consistent experience

 

Travel and hospitality brands need more control over their data and visibility into their customers to create, automate, and optimize personalized journeys that drive growth and lifetime customer value. By creating personalized, behavior-based journeys at every stage of the lifecycle, brands can send relevant offers, recommendations, or notifications that don’t just meet customers’ needs but anticipate them – ensuring customers complete their purchase and return the next time they’re thinking about making a booking.

This is where choosing a MarTech platform that enables you to leverage customer data with less effort, fewer resources, and no additional technical support can be instrumental for creating better customer experiences. When selecting MarTech solutions, start by prioritizing tools that address your brand’s immediate customer engagement needs. A unified customer engagement platform can often help you avoid data silos and enable seamless cross-channel campaigns.

Look for one MarTech solution that enables... 

 

Data collection. Brands increasingly need a platform that can support cross-channel data collection and provide real-time insights into viewer behavior and preferences to offer customers maximum value.

 

Behavioral insights. Customer engagement platforms need to provide tools for optimizing content recommendations and timing as well as predictive insights to help determine the best strategies to use to connect with customers.

 

Automated journey orchestration. Analytics must be able to quickly react to trending destinations, audience sentiment, and the performance of various deals, bundles, or offers. Use a platform that enables you to trigger automated and timely messages as customer intent rises or drops, or when behaviors change.

 

Data privacy and compliance. Compliance is especially complex when handling international audiences, and brands need a robust platform that ensures data security and adherence to regional regulations.

 

How Acoustic Connect can help travel and hospitality brands increase personalization

 

Real-time insights let brands understand and react to audience interests immediately, whether it’s an all-inclusive offer, spring break deal, or summer excursion exclusive. By tailoring recommendations and promotions based on up-to-the-minute preferences and a customer’s preferred frequency of communication, brands can keep audiences engaged with relevant, timely content, even as a customer’s interest shifts.

 

A powerful customer engagement platform like Acoustic Connect provides you with automation capabilities that can improve the productivity of your team, reduce the amount of effort it takes to launch and monitor campaigns, and reach your audience with real-time communications.

Learn more about how advanced analytics powered through a customer engagement platform can create seamless customer journeys and lasting engagement in our book, Destination loyalty: Creating lasting connections in travel and hospitality.