Today’s travelers are no longer just looking for a place to stay — they’re seeking an escapade that feels uniquely theirs. However, with this renewed enthusiasm comes a more discerning eye, with travelers being more careful about where to spend their time and hard-earned money.
And, as you may have noticed, the old ways of attracting customers aren’t always sufficient to keep up with these changing demands. Plus, staying up to date with evolving trends and adapting your marketing efforts to meet them can be overwhelming. No wonder many successful brands are using the power of AI and automation to keep up and stay profitable.
At Bloomreach, our goal is to equip you with an AI-powered platform and all the advanced tools you need to supercharge your travel business and boost revenue. Loomi AI, our advanced AI built specifically for ecommerce, understands what your customers want and helps you create personalized travel campaigns that drive more revenue.
With Loomi AI, you’ll be ready to meet market trends, achieve your goals, and have everything you need for success.
To help you get started, we’ll explore the challenges travel businesses might face and three use cases you can use to your advantage so that your customers keep coming back.
Notable Insights in the Travel Industry
When you’re mapping out your marketing plans, it’s helpful to get a clear picture of where the travel and hospitality industries stand today. After all, the past few years have been tough, with the pandemic and economic challenges shaking things up.
Here are the trends you need to know to better navigate this landscape:
- Sustainability remains a priority: 85% of consumers now choose products and services based on their environmental impact, driving them to seek eco-friendly brands.
- Younger generations prioritize experiences: Millennials and Gen Z travelers continue to prioritize experiences, with many saving throughout the year specifically for vacations.
- Remote work reduces seasonal travel volatility: The rise of remote work is lessening the impact of traditional travel seasons, with shoulder seasons no longer leading to a drop in ticket sales. International flights are expected to double in volume.
- Interest in solo travel is growing: Solo travel is becoming more popular, with 16% of travelers going on holiday alone in 2023, up from 11% in 2022.
- Online and mobile booking behaviors increase: Online bookings are on the rise, with 72% of travelers preferring to book online in 2023 and 32% completed on mobile devices.
What Are Your Goals?
Next comes your goals. What are the key objectives that will drive your growth? Whether it’s boosting direct bookings, expanding your tour offerings, or strengthening passenger loyalty, having a clear vision of your goals can help you craft a focused and effective plan.
Here are some common industry goals:
- Increasing direct bookings: Reducing reliance on third-party platforms and driving more bookings directly through your website can boost your margins and give you more control over the customer experience.
- Expanding tour offerings: Offering a wider range of tours can help you attract a more diverse audience, cater to different interests, and create more revenue opportunities.
- Improving passenger segmentation: By better understanding your customers and segmenting them effectively, you can tailor your marketing efforts and offers, ensuring you meet their specific needs and preferences.
- Enhancing passenger loyalty and encouraging repeat bookings: Building strong relationships with your customers can lead to higher repeat bookings and greater customer lifetime value. Loyalty programs and personalized experiences can play a key role in achieving this.
- Increasing ROI: Focusing on strategies that improve your return on investment is crucial for long-term success. This could mean optimizing your marketing spend, improving operational efficiency, or finding new revenue streams.
Industry Challenges
It also helps to know common industry challenges to stay at the top of your game and plan a strategy that meets your customers’ expectations. Some common challenges include the following:
Sustainability and Ethical Sourcing
Your customers are increasingly looking for products and experiences that are truly sustainable and ethically sourced. Modern customers are smart, and they can easily spot greenwashing. It is thus essential to offer genuine, eco-friendly options that align with their values.
Competition and Market Saturation
Identifying what sets your brand apart and highlighting these unique selling points in everything you do can help you attract and retain customers.
Besides, with the US travel industry leading in digital ad growth, it’s more important than ever to ensure every dollar you spend on advertising counts. By optimizing your ad strategies, you can stand out and make a bigger impact in a crowded market.
Changing Consumer Behaviors
As more travelers book online and shopping habits shift, the approach to customer support also needs to evolve. Streamlining the booking process and integrating omnichannel experiences can help you meet each customer’s expectations and keep them coming back.
Brand Reputation
Maintaining a positive brand reputation in an era of heightened social consciousness and scrutiny requires a brand to prioritize transparency, responsible practices, and ethical behavior across all operations.
Unlocking the Power of Bloomreach in Travel
Travel businesses are experiencing fierce competition, and we’re helping them excel by ensuring their marketing messages hit the mark. With Bloomreach, companies are achieving a:
- 99% inbox placement rate
- 28% email click rate
- 46% SMS click rate
- 58% push delivery rate
Haven Personalizes Multiple Customer Journeys With Managed Endpoint
Haven, one of Britain’s top family holiday companies, operates over 40 holiday parks across the UK, offering a mix of activities, entertainment, and beautiful locations. Despite its success, the company has faced the challenge of understanding the diverse needs of its customers, whether they’re planning a weekend getaway or looking to buy a holiday home. Each customer has a unique journey, and Haven needed to cater to these differences to provide a seamless experience.
To solve this, Haven adopted Bloomreach Engagement, which has empowered the brand to deeply understand its customers’ behaviors and personalize their online experience. Using the managed endpoints API, Haven could tailor its website’s content in real time based on what visitors had previously searched for or purchased. For example, if a customer had searched for “holidays with dogs,” the homepage would show images and options for pet-friendly vacations. This made customers feel understood and valued, increasing the likelihood they’d continue their journey with Haven.
The results were impressive. After testing the personalized homepage against a non-personalized version, Haven saw a 77% increase in click-through rates, leading more customers to initiate bookings. Not only did this boost customer engagement, but it also saved Haven time and money on infrastructure.
On The Beach Boosts Conversions With Customized Price Drop Campaigns Using Bloomreach Engagement
On The Beach is a leading UK online holiday package company specializing in customizable flight and hotel bundles. The brand’s search interface helps users create their ideal holiday with flexible pricing on flights, hotels, and transfers. However, with countless possible combinations of travel options, personalizing marketing campaigns to match each customer’s unique preferences was a major challenge.
On The Beach struggled to turn its vast data into targeted marketing efforts. The brand relied on generalized campaigns that featured popular packages but couldn’t address individual customer preferences. This approach limited its ability to engage users with relevant offers and personalized experiences.
To overcome this, On The Beach turned to Bloomreach Engagement to integrate its data and channels into one platform and create highly personalized campaigns tailored to each user’s specific interests and behaviors.
One standout solution was a price drop email campaign. Using Bloomreach’s solution, powered by Loomi AI, On The Beach developed a system that tracked hotel prices and notified customers of any discounts. Whenever a lower price was found for a hotel they were interested in, an email was automatically sent, inviting them to reconsider their booking with the updated, lower price.
The test campaign drove a 180% increase in conversions, a 95% increase in click-through rates, and a remarkable 362% boost in revenue per visitor within just three days.
Following these successes, On The Beach expanded the campaign, achieving conversion rates 587% above average and click-through rates 477% above average.
Key Use Cases and Strategies You Can Start Using Today With Bloomreach
Now that we’ve explored some challenges and opportunities in the travel industry, it’s time to reach out to your customers. In particular, you’ll want to center your campaigns around key moments when people are more keen to travel. Here are some examples:
To help you effectively reach travelers at the right time, here are three use cases you can implement with Bloomreach:
Informational Communications
Customers who receive timely and relevant travel plan updates feel valued and connected. Informational comms can thus boost advocacy, net promoter scores (NPS), average order value (AOV), customer lifetime value (CLTV), and overall return on investment (ROI).
Targeting active customers with personalized content allows you to effectively alert them about any emergencies or disruptions, such as a swimming pool closure, and minimize the impact on their trip.
For instance, let’s consider a scenario where 12,000 customers are affected by a resort issue. A multi-channel communication strategy — think push notifications, SMS, and WhatsApp — ensures that messages reach them swiftly. Email and SMS can also keep customers informed while they’re on the move, reducing their need to call customer service. This approach helps retain your NPS and protects your revenue, loyalty programs, and future bookings.
By integrating these communication channels, you can enhance your reach during emergencies. Customers who receive updates through their preferred channels feel well-informed rather than overwhelmed.
Now, imagine if you can effectively reach 82% of your customers with essential information. You’ll significantly boost brand advocacy, translating to approximately 9,840 highly satisfied customers out of the 12,000.
Bloomreach’s dashboards and reports provide insights into these interactions, allowing you to track and measure the impact of your efforts and ensuring a positive outcome in terms of customer retention and business metrics.
Share My Search Weblayer
Most modern travelers want interactions tailored to their individual preferences. “Share my search” weblayers (aka on-site banners) allow you to leverage zero-party data and real-time insights so that you can provide a more customized experience.
By implementing this feature, you serve weblayers directly on your site, using forms or gamified elements to encourage users to share their holiday searches with their travel companions. This approach personalizes their experience and keeps them engaged and interested.
By making the booking process easier and more interactive, you help customers stay on your site longer, speeding up their journey from search to booking. The result is a notable increase in conversion rates, lifting them from the industry average of 23% to nearly 28% and enhancing engagement by 4.7% compared to traditional campaigns.
And, with analytics notifications, you can track the effectiveness of the weblayer and fine-tune your strategies to further enhance personalization.
Reactivation Series
Reactivating lapsed customers and converting even a fraction of their annual bookings can significantly boost your revenue. It’s often more cost-effective to retain your existing customers than to acquire new ones, making it crucial to address lapsing customers effectively.
The reactivation series use case triggers automated campaigns tailored to individual lapsing periods. By personalizing outreach based on the timing of their lapses, rather than using a generic schedule, you can engage customers in a relevant and timely way.
With Bloomreach, you can use the preloaded “overdue booking” campaign to get started quickly. From there, you can make additional adjustments and add recommendations to personalize your reactivation program further. This level of customization enhances the chances of turning a lapsed customer into an active one.
By successfully converting just a small percentage of lapsed customers back to active status, you can save on the costs of acquiring new customers and generate additional revenue. With customers averaging 3.4 bookings per year, the potential for revenue growth is substantial.
Utilizing our advanced analytics will help you measure the uplift in revenue and engagement from this campaign. You can also enhance personalization by integrating weblayers that collect zero-party data, further refining your strategies. With this use case, even a 1% reactivation rate could result in millions in revenue.
Ready To See These Use Cases in Action and Supercharge Your Growth?
As the travel industry evolves, staying ahead means embracing cutting-edge technology that delivers personalized, automated, and omnichannel communication. Bloomreach’s Loomi AI is designed to help you understand and engage your customers like never before, driving higher conversion rates and fostering deeper loyalty.
Ready to see your travel KPIs soar? Contact us today to schedule a personalized demo.
