The 11th annual Digital Travel Summit was recently held at the Hyatt Regency Austin, bringing together more than 300 executives from the travel, hospitality, and tourism industries. This year’s theme, “Navigating the Digital Frontier: Transforming Travel for Tomorrow,” underscored the industry’s commitment to leveraging cutting-edge solutions to enhance customer experiences, drive growth, and highlight the critical role that data-driven marketing can play in this vertical.
As all marketing strategies shift towards being data-driven, travel and hospitality companies have an advantage, given they’ve been data-driven for years. First-party data provides the most valuable insights into a company’s ideal customers, revealing what they want at every touchpoint, as well as how to find similar audiences. Travel and hospitality companies have a wealth of data due to their unique attributes and position in the ecosystem:
- Customer preferences including preferred destinations, travel dates, accommodation types, and activities. This data can be used to help companies in other industries tailor their products and services to better meet customer needs.
- Demographic information such as age, gender, income level, and family size. This data can be used to help other companies target specific customer segments and develop marketing strategies that resonate with their target audience.
- Behavior patterns including booking patterns, spending habits, and travel frequency. This information can help companies understand customer motivations and preferences, allowing them to anticipate and meet customer needs more effectively.
- Market trends such as popular destinations and changes in consumer preferences. This data can help companies in other industries stay informed and adapt their strategies to capitalize on market opportunities.
First-party data powers a new way forward for travel companies
When travel companies leverage their first-party data to jumpstart marketing by using people-based identity, they can develop better, more engaging, more personalized marketing that taps the wealth of information they have about consumers – as well as activate it across the ecosystem. This then enables them to reach their customers wherever they’re spending their time, while driving better results from their marketing.
As first-party data strategies become more commonplace across the industry, marketers are building on them with a cutting-edge strategy to drive even better returns: data collaboration. Data collaboration involves gathering and connecting data from various sources to unlock combined data insights, enabling companies of all sizes to grow customer intelligence.
TripAdvisor was among the companies at The Digital Travel Summit speaking to how it’s using data collaboration to fuel marketing performance not only for itself, but its partners as well:
“Through its work with LiveRamp, TripAdvisor works to activate and augment your data. Our goal is to help you achieve your KPIs through the intersection of personalization, optimization, and efficiency. A data clean room enables us to achieve all this and more at a much larger scale.” – Ian Kimball, Associate Head of Hotels & OTA Sales, Americas, TripAdvisor
Data is the way forward for travel, hospitality, and tourism
Across many of the sessions at the Digital Travel Summit, we heard about the importance of data for driving results, whether it was understanding customers’ journeys, discussing how to unify data in tools like a Customer Data Platform, looking at how to reduce friction during bookings, or countless other angles.
These follow a similar trend as first-party data and data collaboration. No matter what part of the ecosystem your company occupies, we’ve now got more – and better – data than ever before, and companies can use this data to improve every part of the customer experience.
Read more about how Omni Hotels and Resorts drove 4x better marketing performance using its first-party data here.