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TRAVEL & LEISURE MARKE TINGIMPROVE THE ONLINE TRAVEL

EXPERIENCE WITH A SOCIALIZED, MOBILIZED AND PERSONALIZED WEB

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1. Introduction1.1 Market outlook1.2 Travel and leisure purchase online

2. Selling the travel and leisure experience Online2.1 The traveler’s journey2.2 The mobile opportunity and 3I’s: Individualism, Immediacy, Inspiration

3. Case Studies3.1 Skistar : Creating a social travel experience for users3.2 The Cooperative Travel: Rich real-time functionality helps engage travel customers

Table of contents

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Online is now the default location for travelers looking for everything from vacation inspirations, hotel bookings, family days out, to a bargain getaway. After a couple of tough years for the travel industry, things are looking up as the US Travel Association recently noted that travel sentiment is at its highest level since April 2007.1 Still, competition remains stiff and the battle for customers’ attention is increasingly being fought online. What online travel and leisure companies need is to sell is an ‘experience’ that starts from the moment of the first interaction and keeps the customer engaged before, during and after the trip. In order to do so, a personalized and relevant user experience is essential to sustaining your visitors’ interests and gaining trust every step of the way.

This paper will examine the ‘user journey’ of travelers, from research and planning to departure and return, and look at how travel and leisure companies can engage with their customers at each stage of the journey. We’ll then discuss the 3I’s (Inspiration, Individualism, Immediacy) identified by Forrester’s research and explore the opportunity presented by mobile, social and personalization in driving online travel transactions.

This paper aims to provide practical advice on where online travel and leisure companies should focus their digital effort, how to devise a personalized user experience across multiple channels, and take advantage of the rise of social media and the mobile opportunity.

1 MMGY Global / U.S. Travel Association, travelhorizons™ Quarterly Report, April 2012

Intro

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The travel and leisure industry has faced a couple of challenging years with consumers across America taking fewer leisure and business trips since 2007.2 However, as of this year some of the indicators are starting to turn around. Whilst the percentage traveling over the last 12 months is still lower than before the recession in 2008, the amount of individuals planning a trip in the next six months is back at its pre-recession level.3

Although interest in emerging tourist destinations has grown thanks to international events like the recent London 2012 Olympics, the lagging economy has many Americans opting not to travel abroad. While we are still vacationing, we’re planning closer, cheaper and shorter travels.4

While internet has long played an important role for purchasing airfare, reserving a hotel or renting a car, it is now the natural focal point for anyone planning a trip. A recent comScore report confirms this and depicts “travel info” as one of the fastest growing segments achieving unique visitors.5 This not only highlights the importance of content, but also hints at the collision of commerce and content in the online travel market. Finally, as expected smartphones play a more prominent role when visiting travel related content. Although, less than 10% actively use their phones to access travel services today, this segment is growing rapidly and there is mounting evidence that mobile purchase intent is stronger than when visitors are coming from a desktop environment.6

Market overview

2MMGY Global / U.S. Travel Association, travelhorizons™ Quarterly Report, April 20123MMGY Global / U.S. Travel Association, travelhorizons™ Quarterly Report, April 20124comScore MobiLens 3 Month Average December 20115comScore MobiLens 3 Month Average December 20116xAd-Telmetrics “mobile path to purchase” study

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The internet plays a fundamental role in the research process for travel and leisure products, with 71 percent of consumers having browsed for a flight, hotel or vacation in the last six months. Yet just 56 percent of people have booked their travel on the web.7

The survey results highlight the importance of the internet for booking, and echo the results of an earlier Econsultancy/Toluna travel survey, which found that the web was involved in 85 percent of travel purchases, either in the research phase, or for actual bookings. If we include mobile and tablets then 71 percent of travel research takes place online, making the internet absolutely vital for travel and leisure brands8. It’s no surprise really, as vacations are the biggest purchase of the year for many people, and it’s a decision that can take some time.

Apart from constituting a marketplace to complete travel transactions, the internet is becoming an increasingly important source for finding relevant and authentic travel information. 54 percent of all queries related to travel were targeting “travel info”9. This is part of an on-going trend where targeted, authentic information that resonates with the audience is becoming the starting point for engagement.

With the rules of the game changing, travel & leisure companies need an agile approach to stay in the game. Given that the process of planning and buying a travel service online has not changed much in the last ten years, there is ample room for innovation and creating more engaging experiences. They key question is how you can become more relevant and engaging to your audience.

Travel and leisure purchase online

7 Econsultancy Report, 20118 Hotel Marketing Report, November 20119 comScore MobiLens 3 Month Average December 2011

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Travel and leisure is one of the most competitive industries in the online space. A good understanding of the travel booking experience is vital for creating a seamless user journey on your site to capture traveler’s interests and increase sales. A good starting point is to look at the key areas of the travel journey so you can break down your online strategy.

The traveler’s journey

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The traveler’s journey

PlanIn the planning stage, you need to drive customers to your site and engage them. Remember, how your site is built and the content you provide will impact organic search and hence your ability to drive traffic to your site. Before you begin this though, consider whether more traffic is really what you need. Transactional travel sites should ideally convert at least 2 percent to 5 percent of web traffic, otherwise you need to think about whether you’re wasting money on paid media (search and display) and not getting the right returns. If this is the case, you need to work on optimizing your site or online content rather than ploughing money into getting more traffic.

Personalizing the user journey can have a major impact on conversions. Make sure that you have decided what you, as a business, should class as a ‘conversion’ – is it a purchase? A brochure download? A completed application form or click-through to an affiliate link? This way you know what to measure against.

Travel organizations should also tap into the power of social media. Online reviews, ratings and recommendations play an increasingly important role in travel and leisure booking, so make sure you build that into your site to make it easy for your customers. As social media matures, customers now expect you to engage with them on their terms. Instead of social-spamming your followers when you run a Facebook promotion campaign, make use of available customer information to personalize your offers and help to improve the experience on social channels.

Social media is important for building trust, so ensure that your overall online strategy encompasses the social media channels that are most important for you. The boundaries between social media and your own digital assets are dissolving more and more, which means that you need to provide the user with a seamless experience if they are practicing channel-hopping.

Social commerce is an increasingly important part of the online customer journey. Many of our referrals now come from social media websites, so it was important that the site had this functionality built in.

Leanne Woolvine, Ecommerce Project Manager, Co-operative Travel

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PurchaseSo, you have succeeded in converting your visitors to customers once, or they have expressed an interest. What’s next? While traditional travel and leisure purchases involve some choice, today’s customers are presented with an almost bewildering range of different possibilities (flight only, packaged, all inclusive). With every choice or click, customers can either move closer to purchase or further away. So part of your strategy must be to stay in regular touch with the customer whether they’ve purchased or not, in a way that feels relevant and personal. This is where personalization plays a crucial role, drawing on relevant interactions that are event-driven rather than broadcast.

Once they’ve purchased a flight or booked a hotel, you can use what you know about them to upsell and cross-sell products and services (think flight upgrade, travel insurance, hotel transfer, car rental and excursion) that you know will be relevant to them. Not only will this increase your revenue, but it will also help to enhance the travel experience and build customer loyalty over time.

Departure and tripAs a marketer, your work doesn’t end at departure and there are still plenty of opportunities to engage your customers during their travel. Nearly half of British respondents (45 percent) have used their mobile devices to plan and research their trip once they’ve arrived at their destination.10 For those respondents who use their mobile device while travelling, restaurant research takes priority:

• 29% researched restaurants• 28% checked their flight status• 21% researched attractions• 18% researched accommodation• 16% researched tours

Mobile apps and mobile optimized sites play a crucial role when your customers are on-the-go, contributing to the overall travel experience. Your apps or mobile sites should be context and location driven, providing useful information such as flight status, gate number, local map and attraction, and currency exchange rates. Customers who downloaded an app or logged on to a mobile site will be looking for information that will add value while they are travelling. So make sure you have a good understanding of their needs before embarking on a mobile project.

The traveler’s journey

10 TripAdvisor report, 2011

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Return and next tripMany travel and leisure companies are missing a trick when they don’t follow up with post-trip customer engagement. We all know it’s more difficult and expensive to find new customers than to retain existing ones. Instead of constantly chasing new customers, you need to get customers into the loyalty loop by understanding their needs. Make sure you get your customers thinking about their next trip with you as soon as they come back from their current trip.

Ask customers for feedback and ratings on how their trip went the places they stayed or tours they’ve taken. This information will help you build a travel profile for individual customers and tailor offerings for the next trip based on their preference and interests. It will also give you the chance to resolve any issues before your customers post a bad review about your company on social sites, causing damage to your brand reputation.

Regardless of whether your customers interact with you on your main site, the mobile version, a campaign microsite or on Facebook, they should instantly and unambiguously recognize that it’s you and each channel should add value to their overall travel experience. Achieving this is about making your content ‘context-aware’ across multiple channels. This means that, wherever customers find your content, it looks and feels like it belongs there and provides value to the customer at each stage of the travel journey. This is not about cloning yourself or your content. It is about serving personalized content for the right outlet at the right moment.

Finally, the fast moving nature of the travel market means that marketers need to be able to make changes to, or put on a campaign, across multiple channels as easily and quickly as possible to reduce time to market. To do that, ensure your web management platform is geared for easy multichannel content delivery, without relying on IT, and has the ability to bring all the data back to a single interface so you can have a full picture of the analytics.

The traveler’s journey

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Understanding the traveler’s journey and realizing the opportunity for engagement presented by different channels is essential for a long-lasting customer relationship. And one of the key growth drivers for the travel and leisure industry has been the rise of mobile. Google has estimated that by the end of 2011 28 percent of all travel-related queries came from mobile devices and, within that, tablets account for nearly a third. What’s more, during the weekend when bookings are typically highest, these devices account for an even greater percentage of total queries.11

A recent survey by TripAdvisor revealed that a significant 22 percent of respondents to a mobile device travel survey of over 1,200 British people have now incorporated a mobile device into their travel planning process. Of those using their mobile devices to plan vacations, researching and booking accommodation is the most common activity:

• 29% have booked or researched accommodation• 27% have researched destinations• 26% have read traveller reviews• 23% have researched restaurants• 18% have booked or researched flights

The mobile opportunity

11 EyeForTravel, February 201212 Why smart phones will become one of travel’s two most important touchpoints, Forrester, July 2011

where to?

m.airbnb.com/#

And these figures are set to grow with what Forrester12 called the 3I’s – Individualism, Immediacy and Inspiration. Moreover, recent reports suggest that queries from mobile devices are significantly more likely to convert to actual purchases. One such study reveals that one third of mobile users making a travel related query are looking to complete a transaction within a day. The same study shows that 46 percent of mobile users making a query will press ahead and complete the purchase. This is a dramatic finding.

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Individualism Travel and leisure activities are experienced by individuals, and we all know that one size doesn’t fit all. This is where personalization comes into the picture and plays an important role in making or breaking a buying decision. Leverage social (e.g. profile on Facebook) and location (GPS) based smartphone features to create a personalized online experience for mobile users across the traveler’s journey. For example, use what you know about the individuals from their social user profile and location to adapt your content and offerings for optimal results. If they are outdoor enthusiasts, show them offers for active vacations in places where direct flights are available from their closest departure airport. Once they’ve booked, upsell seat upgrades on their flights or cross-sell hotel rooms in the city they are going to.

The mobile opportunity

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ImmediacyAs we are ‘always on’ with our smartphones, Wi-Fi hotspots and 4G connections, growing evidence has suggested that we’re all suffering from shortened attention spans in a world of ‘instant gratification and quick fixes’13. What this means for businesses is that customers nowadays have no patience for slow and poorly designed websites, and have low tolerance for information that doesn’t immediately interest them. They want only relevant information, exactly when they want it. With alternative websites or travel promotions from competitors just a mouse click away, customers won’t wait for information.

Consumer adoption of mobile devices is soaring, with our own research revealing that 73 percent of consumers have recently accessed websites on their mobile device. However, more than a quarter of consumers said they find mobile websites hard to navigate, while 35 percent said that if a mobile website is hard to use they’ll drop off. Common complaints included slow sites, difficult logins, missing functionality and content.

Consumers are not alone in their frustrations with mobile websites and apps though; we also asked marketers to share their experiences and they reported numerous barriers to developing coherent strategies such as lack of technology, budget, and the ability to prove ROI. Overall, the research showed that only 20 percent of companies have a mobile optimized site.14

To make sure you meet travelers’ expectations, an optimized mobile site or app is essential in supporting your personalization strategy and getting the right information and offers to your customers at the right time. It can also be used to improve areas such as customer service and waiting time, dramatically reducing the time and effort required from the customers to alter reservations or get in touch with you.

The mobile opportunity

13 Pew Internet Study 201214 EPiServer Research – Delivering a mobile strategy, November 2011

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Inspiration With the proliferation of smart phones and improved WiFi and 4G connections, users are increasingly watching video and accessing social media directly from their mobile devices. So as consumers are now opting to access social media and video on mobile there’s opportunity for travel and leisure companies to make use of these channels to inspire travelers on-the-go with multimedia and social sharing.

High quality pictures, video and user-generated content can provide sources of inspiration for travelers researching a vacation. Tying images in with reviews and recommendations from other travelers who have been to particular destinations of interest, or perhaps stayed at a nearby hotel, can make a stronger case in the research and planning process of the travel-booking journey. So make sure your video content is available on your mobile-optimized site and that it supports the right display format. Making use of social media connectors (e.g. Facebook connect) can also provide vital information on what your customers have watched or liked, which ties back in to your personalization strategy.

The mobile opportunity

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Skistar: Creating a social travel experience for users

If you go skiing in Sweden or Norway, there is an overwhelming chance you will be at one of SkiStar’s resorts. SkiStar’s website (skistar.com) is a continuously growing portal, with the company placing strong emphasis on delivering personalized content and leveraging the mobile channel.

Creating a digital travel journeySkiStar.com is all about skiing, providing inspiration, information, weather updates and booking services for Scandinavia’s five largest ski resorts to skiers and families from Scandinavia and across Europe. With over 70 percent of the prepaid bookings made over the website, this is obviously a key driver of business. Still, it is paramount to SkiStar that their website is not simply a place where visitors book their vacations. Rather the site and its accompanying mobile app are to be a source of inspiration and information before, during and after the journey, thereby enabling SkiStar to create an ongoing relationship with their customers.

Personalized contentBeing the Scandinavian industry leader in skiing, SkiStar has plenty of interesting information and offers for skiers based on target groups. SkiStar presents the site based on browser language and uses IP information, cookies and session data to display relevant offers and information. “We try to make the site as relevant as possible for the visitor using it. In cases where someone has previously registered on the site and made a purchase, we can also use this information when they return to the site” says Mattias Persson, Online Manager at SkiStar. Two very basic examples of personalized content are: a visitor from Stockholm, which is on the east coast, does not get presented

with flight offers from the Swedish west coast, and a customer who has already bought a ski pass doesn’t receive information about the benefits of buying a ski pass online.

User-generated content that mattersIn order to make social media work, one often needs to go beyond the possibility of enabling sharing of already existing content. For that reason, SkiStar doesn’t just create inspiring content on their website, but also allow users to consume and share information on the fly. This is primarily handled through a mobile app, from which users can access weather information, see their individual skiing statistics, locate their friends on the slope, as well as creating games and challenges. SkiStar now has some 135,000 Facebook fans and 60,000 skiers using their app, much thanks to the fact that they have managed to implement an easy way for their visitors to share user-generated content that matters.

http://www.skistar.com/

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Co-operative Travel: Rich real-time functionality helps engage travel customers

By consolidating two of its websites into one master site in 2008, Co-operative has established itself as the UK’s largest independent travel agent. On the highly competitive British online travel market, the success of the new site depends on its ability to be engaging, dynamic and “sticky” – thereby guaranteeing an ideal customer experience.

Engaging content is key to securing business in the highly competitive travel sector.

Working with its digital agency, Ultimedia, Co-operative Travel evaluated a number of CMS solutions and found EPiServer to be the best fit to provide the advanced CMS, e-commerce functionality and managed hosting service it needed for its consolidated online presence. The new Co-operative Travel site has a range of advanced features including easy integration with other existing systems, such as its booking engine Traveltek, TripAdvisor and Google.

Presenting Dynamic ContentCo-operative Travel is the UK’s largest independent travel agent and is unmatched in the range of vacations it offers, backed up by low price points. But this alone is not enough to secure a winning position in what is a highly competitive online travel market. Co-operative Travel knew that, with competitors literally a click away via Google, it needed to build a site that was engaging and ‘sticky’ to deliver a perfect customer experience.

Using EPiServer, Co-operative Travel was able to ensure the site would be constantly updated with the latest product availability and promotions in the easiest possible way. All offers on the site are dynamically generated every four hours, but can also be manually updated by Co-operative Travel’s in house content managers. The CMS automatically embed these offers throughout the site and at all points of the booking funnel to minimise drop out rate.

We had some pretty challenging demands for the site. Not only did it need to be highly adaptable and dynamic, so that we could offer the latest deals to our customers in the shortest time-space possible, it also needed to draw them in and encourage them to make a booking.

– Leanne Woolvine, Ecommerce Project Manager, Co-operative Travel

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Localization and Personalization of offersAnother way to make the site more engaging for visitors the moment they landed on the homepage was to use advanced localization and personalization. Using EPiServer CMS, landing page content on the site is now targeted at visitors with information based on their current location. For example, if a customer logs on from Bristol to book a flight or vacation to Tenerife the site can, via IP, identify where they are located and automatically suggest relevant vacations from Bristol Airport.

Social CommerceWith most people coming to the site to book a family vacation, social media integration has a big role to play on the new site. The EPiServer CMS automatically includes social media bookmarks for Facebook, Digg, Twitter, Delicious and others. In addition, Ultimedia used EPiServer to create a ‘Send to a friend’ function, to allow users to share content via email and increase referral.

Increased RevenueThe consolidated website has been a proven success, with a 95% increase in visitors and with revenue up 217%. Since the consolidation the Co-operative Travel site has won several prestigious industry awards including the TTG Online Travel Agent of the Year 2011 and British Travel Awards’ Travel Agency Website of the Year 2011.

What does the future hold?Co-operative Travel has upgraded the site to the latest version of EPiServer CMS, which will bring additional personalization opportunities, mobile capability and SEO enhancements.

We’re not standing still and there are always improvements and upgrades we can make to the site. We’re working closely with EPiServer and Ultimedia to ensure we are always at the cutting edge and providing the best possible experience for all our customers.

Co-operative Travel: Rich real-time functionality helps engage travel customers

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Travel and Leisure customers already using EPiServer

Cooperative Travel - http://www.co-operativetravel.co.uk/ Dublin Bus - http://www.dublinbus.ie/ Legoland - http://www.legoland.dk/en/ Park Resorts - http://www.park-resorts.com/ P&O Cruises - http://www.pocruises.com/ SAS Airline - http://www.sas.se/en/ Scandic Hotels - http://www.scandichotels.com/ Skistar - http://www.skistar.com/en/ Small Luxury Hotels - http://www.slh.com/ Visit Sweden - http://www.visitsweden.com/sweden/ Fritidsresor - http://www.fritidsresor.seVisit Norway - http://www.visitnorway.no