Benefits of Big Data in Travel Industry (Case Studies Included)
“ Hurry, Book your tickets to Goa now & get 50% off on booking 5-star Hotel for 3 days and 2 nights”
Have you ever got a pop-up like the above text regarding the discount on the flight booking? Or have you ever got a notification regarding booking in a hotel at your favorite place?
I think your answer is definitely yes. Isn’t it amazing to know the flight and hotel rates just through a notification?….it is like an inquiry counter is just at your doorstep. Isn’t it?
MakeMyTrip, Goibibo, Airbnb, Trivago, etc. are the traveling apps that use Big data to provide the best possible services to their customers.
Travel & Tourism is a sector which is evergreen. People generally love to travel. This never-ending interest of people towards traveling has boosted the startups in the travel industry.
Many new traveling agencies or companies are establishing in the market. And there is no denying the fact that with an increase in travel there will be an increase in the generation of data associated with it.
Therefore, massive amounts of data are being captured and stored by travel companies. At every step of the travel journey, they collect data of transactions, flight paths, customer data, check-ins, etc.
Big data helps to combine, manage, and store all this information efficiently. It also helps to make the customer feel more appreciated and better serviced, resulting in more revenue and higher profit generation.
According to Graham Cooke, “ 92% of customers of a travel website will not convert into business, and 60% of visitors never return after a first visit.” Therefore, a personal approach to customers is essential in the Travel Industry. Big data helps to deliver the right message at the right time to the right person. This increases the conversion rate of conversation into a profitable business.
It is good news that Big Data startups focused on the Travel industry are continuously growing.
For Example – Duetto Research is a company that helps hotels in forecasting and understanding future demand patterns using Big data. Travelling is an emotion, and with proper tool organizations, one can grow revenue simply by delivering the right product to the right person at the right time.
Let us study some of the Interesting Benefits of Big Data in the Travel Industry.
Interesting Benefits of Big Data in the Travel Industry
1. Revenue Management
Generally, the traveling industry faces the challenge of selling the right product, to the right customer, at the right time. All this required analysis of internal as well as external data.
Internal data includes past customer experiences and expectations, room revenue, occupancy rates, and current bookings.
External data includes information about local events, flights, weather, flights, and holidays. Both the internal and external data helps to get accurate data. It also helps to predict future demands in advance. As a result, it helps to manage increasing demand in prior, thus maximizing the overall revenue generated.
Big data helps to control a particular business mix and pricing strategy. It also helps to enhance the optimization process.
Revenue Management helps in incorporating the analytics and determining which properties are actually relevant to the customers that are willing to pay. It is also used to determine the rate of competition and thus helps a business to plan the next move.
Case Study 1: United Airlines – Encourage Loyalty
United Airlines uses customer data – they follow the “ collect, detect, act “ protocol to analyze over 150 variables in each customer profile. This analysis measures almost everything from previous purchases to customer preferences.
As a result, it helps to generate a tailor-made offer. Big data techniques have increased United’s travel industry year-to-year revenue by over 15%.
2. Strategic Marketing
Integrating Big data and marketing management strategy helps organizations to make a substantial impact on delivering facts and figures. This fact, when converted into stats, helps to find insight about customers, like what they want, how they want, and when they want, etc.
Big data helps Travel & Tourism companies to adopt a more strategic approach in targeting the right people at the right time.
Specifically, we can say that it helps businesses identify the trends among the customers, helping to identify the right opportunities to gain profit. This also helps in target marketing, and thus, promotional content can be delivered according to targeted customers.
Case Study 2: “ EasyJet – Deploy Artificial Intelligence”
With the help of Big data analytics, many airlines analyze the accumulated data from purchase activity to demand patterns. If an airline observes the demand for a certain route increasing, then they adjust the prices accordingly. This information also helps to identify which customer segments are price sensitive and determines a segment’s price range for a given route.
“EasyJet determines seat pricing automatically, depending on demand with the help of an artificially intelligent algorithm.” This system can also analyze the historical data to predict the demand patterns for each year in advance. Furthermore, these analytics also impact future decision-making about schedules, alliances, route, etc.
3. Customer Experience
The Travel & Tourism industry has frequent interactions with the customers, and each of the interactions provides valuable data, which can be used to improve the overall customer experience.
With the help of this collected data, companies can make more informed data-driven decisions like what services they no longer need to provide, what services they need to introduce, and the new technology they need to invest in.
Case Study 3: American airline Delta: Track bags on Smartphones
American airline Delta allowed customers to track their bags on their smartphones through an app. This app uses exactly the same technology that the delta ground staff uses. Till now, around 11 million delta customers have downloaded this app globally.
4. Reputation Management
Big data helped in smooth functioning, starting from billing and payment to providing other services, everything has become flexible. The augmented services are the things for which customers are ready to spend so much money.
Example – TAJ hotel is especially known for its hospitality. The humble, polite, and courteous staff is the reason that differentiates it from the other hotels. Employees over there are trained in hotel management courses. To improve their services, they also involve the system of feedback from customers.
So, when the feedback data get analyzed, it is used to spot the most important strengths and weaknesses. Once this information is gathered, management can improve their training efforts to ensure a positive future response from the customer side.
5. Market Research
Big data helps to analyze and compile information about its main competitors. It is used to get an insight into what other hotels or businesses are offering to their customers. It collects customer’s opinions and views from various online platforms.
Online platforms may be social media, different apps, google reviews, etc. There is no shortage of places where customers can give ratings and reviews about a particular hotel, travel company, etc. All these data can be used to gather the strengths, weaknesses, and overall reputation of rival companies.
This helps business leaders to spot the potential gaps in the market. These are the opportunities that can be used to excel in the market.
6. Targeted Marketing
Customers can be categorized into several categories, which is based on factors like their paying capability, behavior, location preferences, etc. The budget of customers, even for the same destination, can vary a lot.
So, by understanding the requirements of customers and doing market research, the guest experience can be enhanced. All this will also help to gain loyalty among customers.
Now, let us study some of the Use Cases of Big Data.
Use Cases of Big Data
1. Alerting and Monitoring Systems
Usually, the amount of data generated and collected by any business is enormous. It’s not possible to handle it manually without anomalies. Therefore, companies are using supervised machine learning techniques to detect defects in the systems.
Machine learning algorithms help to create alerts when something abrupt or wrong happens in the system. This helps businesses to take immediate action and also helps in the planning of necessary strategies.
2. Click And Conversion Optimization
Click And Conversion Optimization is all about making a sale without doing a lot of product exposure. The main focus here is the optimization of digital advertising.
Predictive algorithms are useful to estimate the conversion rate, positioning of the advertisement and it helps to optimize them. It helps to understand the passenger’s needs by understanding the traveler’s preferences in a better and efficient way. Thus, it creates a new platform for online advertising.
3. Sentiments Analysis And Profiling
Today, almost everyone is using Social Media. The crowd on social media platforms is increasing day by day. So, it is not possible for an individual or a business to monitor social media manually anymore. Now let us study how this huge data helps in Sentiments Analysis And Profiling.
Generally, Travellers share their photos and sentiments on social media about their trip. They mostly like to review and share locations and hotels on social media for others. Here comes the business of sentiment analysis.
With the help of Big data analytics, they read the data in a fraction of seconds. Then machine learning algorithms check the sentiments from data and respond immediately. This helps businesses to respond within minutes to your bad reviews about them on the web.
4. Recommendations and recommender systems
Sites like Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra, etc. generally recommend products that you have recently or frequently purchased. It happened because it observed your last purchase history and understood your needs and demands.
“ The two most efficient examples of product recommendations are Netflix & Amazon. ”
Recommendations rule the travel industry also. I am sure you have observed that while browsing for flight rates of different locations, you started getting a popup for a cheap & attractive Airbnb. You might not make the immediate booking, but it definitely persuades you to make your trip earlier.
The logic behind it is Big data. Yes, Big data allows analysis of searches you have done in the past. This recommender service provides benefits to both travelers and travel providers. Thus, Big data benefits the Travel industry a lot.
Conclusion
Big data is the technology that will definitely bring a big revolution for humanity. It has immense potential to serve almost every sector. Especially in the travel industry, Big data provides a new way to look at the system. In the coming years, the travel industry will go far with holding the hands of Big data.