The 5 Stages of a Travel
Communications Strategy:
Extending the "Customer High"
Find out how extending the “customer high” with an
immersive travel communications strategy can drive unprecedented engagement and revenue opportunities.
Recent research shows that customers experience the peak of their “travel high” at the point of booking. Not while they’re sitting on a beach, not even when their flight departs on time – at the point of booking. It’s clear that a travel communications strategy needs to recognise this post-booking and pre-departure “journey” as part of the experience itself.
If capitalised on, this journey can create unprecedented engagement and revenue from up-sales, repeat sales, and recommendations. But in order to realise such benefits, travel businesses need to look at fully immersing the customer in a communications journey that is as unique as the customer, from the point of booking right through to their return home.
Let’s take a look at how companies are currently managing their travel communications strategy. We’ll consider capabilities and constraints, and how they can optimise the customer experience throughout the communications journey.
Stage 1: ‘Informing Customers’ with the Customer Reservation System (CRS)
Using the standard documents and emails produced by a CRS is standard practice for many travel companies, to confirm essential transactional information to customers.
While CRS systems are designed for managing complex customer reservations, they are not built for meeting today’s complex customer communication expectations. A CRS fulfils the mandatory communication requirements – producing print-ready documents and sending PDF versions by email. However, these will generally be text-based and not designed for mobile devices. And with little to basic branding support, its output is often simplistic in presentation.
But what are the implications of this?
Imagine your customers feelings at the point of booking. After being inspired by your stunning website and swept away by beautiful imagery, they may have been transported to the end destination through video – tempting them to go ahead and book in a state of heightened excitement. They then receive booking documentation that resembles an insurance document of yester-year – potentially attached to an equally unexciting email. The result? A disjointed brand experience and according to recent research, a deflated customer at the most crucial stage of their booking journey.
The documentation and communications customers receive should look and feel every bit as exciting as what they experienced prior to the booking stage. They should be personalised and relevant, and completely aligned with your branding and the product your customer has purchased. Anything less and you could be crashing your customers’ “travel high”. This could mean losing their potential and valuable advocacy, and pushing them straight into the welcoming arms of your competitor next time around.
Stage 2: ‘Filling the Gaps’ with a dedicated Email Marketing System (EMS)
The rapid take-up of the EMS comes as no surprise with the specific transactional focus of a CRS. Although generally adopted for new customer acquisition, an EMS excels in producing image-rich email communications.
Consequently, it provides a quick-to-implement solution to fill the gaps between basic transactional communications, with some colour and inspirational content. However, the “campaign” approach of an EMS is also its constraining factor.
Limited to working with a subset of customer data, the resulting emails are personalised on high-level data and appear to today’s savvy consumer to be an obvious marketing communication. This exposes them as being campaign-driven using a one-for-all approach. And in a world where 90% of consumers report feeling positively towards firms who treat them like an individual, this will likely miss the mark and may generate high levels of unsubscribes and opt-outs.
This lack of relevance is often what leads companies to look at a Customer Data Platform.
Stage 3: ‘Delivering Personalisation’ by adopting a Customer Data Platform (CDP)
By simplifying and centralising the collation of customer data from a multitude of systems, a CDP can provide a unified, single view of the customer. Being able to then interpret this data and build customer profiles (personas) provides a higher level of context for an EMS. Travel businesses taking this approach can drive more advanced segmented and customer-aligned campaigns. The problem is they remain generally email based.
The next challenge is then taking this customer profile capability and delivering a multi-channel experience. To be able to extend beyond the siloed marketing system and manage the transactional documentation from a CRS provides the biggest advantage to this approach.
Stage 4: ‘Joining the Journey’ with Customer Communications Management (CCM)
In a bid to deliver a multi-channel customer experience, many travel businesses are looking to implement an end-to-end customer communications journey using a CCM system. Built to be application agnostic to flexibly integrate with any application, a CCM can create automated communication journeys that cover both online and offline channels. Incorporating rich and relevant imagery can help create documents and communication that’s personalised to each customer.
Delivering a more personalised experience with a CCM can go a long way to matching – and even exceeding customer expectations, and generating additional revenue from up-sales. And where using an EMS (with or without a CDP) has the potential to drive unsubscribes, implementing a CCM system can achieve the opposite and prevent unsubscribes.
That said, while businesses at this stage of the communications strategy are well on their way to strengthening customer engagement through a more coherent customer journey, there are greater opportunities that can be more easily realised…
Stage 5: ‘The Immersive Experience’ with the TravelComms platform
Implementing an immersive customer journey extends a customer’s “high”, from booking their dream trip through to the physical experience of travel, enjoying time at their destination and right the way through to their return home. This fully-realised travel communications strategy turns customer engagement into deep customer immersion.
TravelComms, the only immersive travel communications platform, has been designed and built in partnership with – and specifically for – the travel industry.
Much like a CDP, TravelComms can aggregate customer data and additional associated content from multiple systems, whether on-premise or in the cloud. The difference is that TravelComms uses actual customer data – instead of an assumed customer persona from an artificial intelligence (AI) system or user profiling – to deliver a uniquely individual customer journey and experience. This real-time data analysis defines the documents and communications sent, their formats (paper or electronic), along with the timing of when they are sent.
Managing all aspects of the transactional and non-transactional journey (we call them experiential rather than marketing), TravelComms negates the need for an EMS and CDP. It perfectly interfaces with all aspects of a travel company’s existing technology stack to deliver an uncompromising, best-in-class communications experience for customers that exceeds expectations. This helps build trust, and ultimately boosts your bottom-line. The only constraint? Your imagination.
Transitioning to Stage 5 and delivering your guests an immersive experience is much simpler than you expect. To increase your retention rates, referrals and revenue opportunities contact our team for a customised demonstration.
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