Using Travel Customer's Data To Help Extend Better Services
A travel consumer's journey begins from the time they dream of going on a holiday. Their dream is 'augmented' when the hospitality sector promotes their brands on social media with alluring photographs and great copy or accompanying text which makes one want to go on this holiday at all costs. The next stage would be the 'planning' stage whereby they sit down and chalk out details of their upcoming holiday. Here, to push out your brand you'd need an appealing website, content with long-tail keywords, engaging content on your travel website, investment in pay-per-click advertisements etc. All these will tell the travel customer that you are the answer they are looking for. Booking their travel and stay would be the next step, and it is a no-brainer that all customers look for easy booking processes and not the prolonged or complicated ones. And lastly, the travel customer experiences the services you have offered.
As per Amadeus, the travel tech company, 90 % of the US travellers who have a smartphone share travel-related experiences and pictures on social media and even review the services they use. TripAdvisor has 390 million unique visitors and 435 million reviews. There is a lot of data on demographics and psychometrics of user behaviour collected by travel companies but what is needed is for them to analyze this wealth of data to their advantage to be able to target users effectively. The voluminous data gathered by travel com[panies can be easily assessed with the help of AI based software. A great example of this has been set by the Dorchester Collection hotel headquartered in London. They use AI to analyze information such as customer reviews, feedback surveys, and online polls using its AI platform. They were able to understand that there was a lack of customer loyalty towards them and on the basis of this data they could come up with better strategies to tackle customers. Sarovar Hotels & Resorts also use cloud-based QMS for data analysis of guest feedback on various operational areas.
Sentiment Analysis Through Social Media
Sentiment Analysis comes handy in identifying and resolving customer grievances. Social Media comes handy in analyzing the mood or sentiment of the customer. They often use it to express their happiness or complaints about their travel and related experiences. If a customer expresses dissatisfaction about a cancelled flight on Social Media sites like twitter, an AI based tool can help the concerned company to get their act together whether it is in the form of a better communication system, discounts, free accomodation before the next flight or however they choose to remedy the situation at hand for a better customer experience. Sentiment Analysis contains a number of steps including data retrieval, data extraction and selection, data pre-processing, feature extraction, topic detection, and data mining.
With such powerful tools at hand, the travel industry is poised to flourish.