To lead in the online travel booking sector and enhance your marketing ROI & customer acquisition rate, your travel data must be enriched with the latest, concise, and accurate information. Poor quality data provides misleading or outdated information to travelers, leading to missed opportunities, increased marketing costs, and poor customer experience.
According to ResearchAndMarkets Global Forecast Report, the Worldwide online travel market size is expected to grow at a CAGR of 10.6% by 2027 to be worth US$1,463.98 billion. In such a competitive era, you can only outperform leading market players by building brand trust online with the best data enrichment practices.
With enriched data, you can analyze travel market trends and offer online visitors competitive deals, price comparisons, travel recommendations, etc., to increase bookings and customer experience for your marketplace. Let’s see how you can gain more customers and retain the old ones with effective tips for travel data enrichment.
5 Essential Data Points for Online Travel Marketplaces
To effectively operate your online travel portal, you must collect and work on essential data points. Here are some of the crucial ones you must validate when collecting data from various sources:
- Destination Information: Travel marketplaces need data on various popular destinations, including must-visit tourist attractions, ongoing cultural festivities and events, local customs and traditions, adventure and sports activities, climate conditions, popular delicacies and restaurants to visit, etc.
- Transport Data: Must have accurate and latest details about various travel routes and ways to reach a particular destination, along with flight/train/bus/taxi fares, timings, routes, etc.
- Accommodation data: Information on hotels, resorts, vacation rentals, and other types of accommodations, including pricing, availability, check-in & checkout policies, and amenities.
- User data: Details on user travel preferences, past bookings, and search history to provide personalized recommendations and a better user experience.
- Regulatory and compliance data: Details on the latest travel guidelines, regulatory requirements, such as visa and passport requirements, and compliance with local laws and regulations.
Top Travel Industry Challenges to Solve with Data Enrichment
As per the Expedia Group 2020 Travel Trends Report, on-average travelers visit 38 websites online before making their final booking. To increase the chances of them booking travel services from your website, you must collect complete and accurate travel information and present it correctly.
While collecting travel data from various sources, online travel marketplaces can face some common challenges, and here are a few of them :
- Data quality: One of the biggest challenges is ensuring the data is accurate and up-to-date. When collecting data from multiple travel sources like blogs, forums, surveys, etc., it is difficult to maintain the reliability of the information.
- Data standardization: When data gets collected from various sources in different structured and unstructured formats, it becomes difficult to maintain its uniformity. The collected data must be integrated in a unified manner to improve website visitors’ experience.
- Data privacy: With rising data security concerns, it is crucial to ensure that the data is collected responsibly and ethically.
- Legacy systems: An outdated legacy system makes it difficult for travel websites & companies to integrate with the latest technologies and implement advanced data enrichment tools/strategies.
- Limited data: Having limited data about targeted customers’ travel preferences and past behavior makes it difficult to create a comprehensive customer view and offer personalized experiences.
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9 Best Travel Data Enrichment Tips to Score More Bookings
Through lead data enrichment , i.e, by collecting and analyzing data on users’ travel interests, you can provide them with more relevant and personalized information to stay ahead of your competition.
But how can you enrich your travel data to make it more effective? Here are some useful tips for doing that:
1. Gather More Customer Data
The more detailed and updated data you have about your customers, the better you can understand their preferences and needs.
When collecting information, consider crucial data points such as travel history, destination preferences, budget, accommodation choices, special days like birthdays, anniversaries, etc., on which they might look for a vacation.
2. Analyze Website and User Data
Analyzing website and user data is a crucial part of data enrichment. It helps gain additional insights into your users’ various aspects, such as their behavior, preferences, interests, and demographics. This information can be used to enrich your existing data by adding additional fields or attributes to user profiles or customer records.
To make marketing and sales strategies that work best for you, analyze your customer data with effective data analytics tools.
You can use tools like Google Analytics, Apache Hadoop, Microsoft Power BI, etc., to analyze your website traffic, user behavior, and unstructured data.
3. Provide Comparative Pricing Insights
Before making an online travel booking, people prefer to compare prices and deals on various sites. To gain a competitive advantage and retain customers, offer them real-time comparative pricing insights.
Keep them updated about seasonal price changes, discounts, budget-friendly group packages and any other details affecting their bookings’ final price to provide transparency.
4. Analyze Your Competitors and Popular Travel Trends
Add crucial details about popular trends to make the information listed on your website more valuable and relevant for visitors. From current climatic conditions to ongoing events, keep all the interesting details about destinations in your listings.
Analyze your competitors’ websites to look for content gaps and current trends. Use competitive intelligence tools like Semrush, Google Trends, Owler, etc., for that. You can also check popular travel hashtags on social media to gain insights into what people like about a particular destination or not.
5. Personalize the Customer Experience
Personalization is the secret sauce to improving customer experience. Use the customer data collected through various sources and landing page forms to provide personalized recommendations. Send them personalized emails and promotions based on travel preferences to score more bookings.
Data segmentation is a crucial part of the data enrichment process. For accurate targeting, divide your data into various segments like budget travel, luxury travel, etc., to show relevant ad campaigns to different audiences. You can also use other factors, like age, marital status, gender, etc., to personalize travel recommendations.
6. Use Reviews and Ratings
Add reviews and ratings to build credibility and make your data look more authentic. Customer reviews on various travel forums and survey websites also help you to understand their pain points, travel preferences, current requirements, etc., to strengthen your marketing and sales strategies.
7. Partner with Other Travel Providers
By collaborating with other travel providers, you can enrich your data and offer customers a more comprehensive travel experience. Try to partner with various airlines, hotels, and tour operators to gain access to their customer data and work on all-in-one travel deal packages to gain more customers.
8. Use AI and Machine-learning Tools & Technology
Use machine learning algorithms to read large datasets for customer behavior, current trends and other crucial details. These algorithms analyze customer data, like their past travel bookings, social media travel updates, search queries, etc., to generate personalized recommendations.
It also helps in price optimization by tracking competitors’ pricing, customer demands, etc. To further save time and resources, you can use AI bots to automate communication and follow-up processes.
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