The Greatest Challenges
to the Travel Industry:
Seizing the Opportunities of Today
Find out how to seize the opportunities of fulfilling customer demands and keeping them spending whilst overcoming workforce shortages and delivering on sustainability.
We recently conducted a global survey to understand how the travel industry identified with the four greatest challenges to business today. Specifically focussing on cruise lines and tour operators, the findings were similar with both and identified one with compelling concern:
- The cruise community were split 50/50 between “delivering positive impact on sustainability” and “fulfilling increasing customer expectations”.
- Respondents from the tour operator community showed similar results with “delivering positive impact on sustainability” selected by 55%.The remainder were split with 33% responding with “workforce shortages and talent” and 12% responding with “fulfilling increasing customer expectations”.
This article looks at all three of these challenges along with the drivers and a way they can be addressed. Additionally, although seemingly not identified as a major concern by and of the respondents, this article also explores the fourth challenge relating to the cost of living impacting customer spend.
Challenge 1: Having a Sustainability Policy that Delivers a Real Difference
It’s little wonder that companies are so focussed on sustainability when customers are increasingly saying how important it is and, crucially, how it influences their holiday choices.
An overwhelming majority of travellers say that sustainable travel is high on the agenda for them and over half want to leave the places they visit in a better condition than when they arrive.
Often, there are many months between booking a holiday and departing on it. This “booking window” provides a prime opportunity to prepare each customer for their upcoming trip and help them maximise their holiday experience.
Incorporating environmental information relating to their destination(s) into the communications sent during this window can help to educate them and heighten their awareness to travelling more responsibly.
Going a step further by sharing facts about the issues and showing people how they can make a difference, for example by reducing their carbon footprint or buying locally made goods in resort, gives them the opportunity to make a positive impact.
Challenge 2: Overcoming Workforce Shortages and Scarcity of Talent
Unsurprisingly, companies in most sectors are struggling to provide the service levels of old, simply because they no longer have the number of staff they did – and with the required skillset.
There are numerous reasons for the shortages. It’s clear that a large amount of the workforce decided to take time out and those that could, retire early. But equally, many have switched to better-paid careers or to starting their own businesses.
Travel has been one of the industries most heavily hit by this and still remains struggling to rebuild the skilled and diverse talent required to keep pace – both in consumer-facing operational and back-office administrative roles.
Digital transformation programs have seen huge investment since the start of the pandemic with the race for companies to digitise many of their customer-facing processes and integrate their transactional processing systems. But unfortunately they have not addressed the many customer-oriented and knowledge worker tasks that still remain human intensive.
A cross-departmental platform that integrates with the various back-office applications can enable companies to move to a new converged model and help win the staffing and talent crisis battle.
Challenge 3: Satisfying the Increasingly Demanding Customers
Both the latest UK Customer Satisfaction Index and American Customer Satisfaction Index show that there has been a general decline in the service levels of companies and a significant number of people have experienced a problem with an organisation.
At the same time, customers are becoming more demanding than ever, with the majority expecting ever higher levels of service. Holidaymakers who have spent considerable sums on trips are understandably frustrated when there is no-one around to answer their most basic requests. And so eliminating this issue has to be the focus over fixing it.
Whilst implementing a platform to support the new “converged” business to support customers better is a must, the travel industry has something to its advantage over other industries. The length of its customer journey provides fantastic opportunities to connect, immerse and build long-lasting relationships with its customers.
Being able to automate the delivery of relevant information to each customer is essential. But being able to also capture their sentiment and feedback at each stage of the customer journey will help to service them more proactively put the company back in the driving seat.
Challenge 4: Ensuring Customers Spend During a Cost-of-Living Crisis
Soaring inflation, energy costs and the general cost of living are having a major impact on disposable income. Whilst figures show that consumers are continuing to book holidays there is a growing concern about the future.
Flight prices have already risen sharply in the past year and a shortage of flights and holidays is likely to exacerbate the situation as high demand will lead to further price rises. Increasingly, travel companies are looking away from competing on price and instead differentiating themselves from their rivals in other areas. If customers feel companies care about them and look after their needs, they are more likely to book with them.
Monitoring customer sentiment throughout the customer journey and actioning the feedback instantly with empathy goes a long way to keeping customers satisfied and happy. Capturing this and net promoter scores in a similar way using Customer Service Questionnaires (CSQs) can be even more rewarding.
Enabling operations, customer services, marketing and sales all to collaborate on a single platform – and subject to also capturing the necessary permissions – customer feedback can be harnessed and used in converting new enquiries to bookings and increasing repeat bookings and referrals.
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