As communication anchors your client’s experience with your brand, it’s time to go digital or go home.

Have you felt the weight of game-changing tech infiltrating all areas of the travel trade? During the planning and booking stages, technology has the ability to insert your brand into the mindset of target customers trying to decide on their next accommodation, restaurant or activity. It influences how attractive your products are to them, how accessible you are, and how responsive your service is.

What kind of content is out there representing you and how do you communicate it? While there’s nothing like a friendly face and a reassuring voice to make anyone feel taken care of and well-served, your digital presence has an equally important role to play – in fact, get that part of the game plan right and it will give you and your staff more precious time to devote to personal attention and other, more interesting promotional and service activities.

Providing visual inspiration

Your relationship with future guest will benefit from the intimacy that comes from addressing them directly with targeted content delivered to them on their personal mobile devices. Your website, social media feed and whatever marketing channels you employ should tell a consistent, inspiring story about the experiences you offer. Nothing gets closer to depicting your offering as ‘realistically’ as VR. Virtual Reality imagery help bring the visitor ‘into’ the experience without actually being present.

Picture exciting aerial views of your property or the area you operate your activities in. Your target customers use a set of VR goggles to enjoy an immersive exploration; or they access virtual tours directly on your digital brochure and click through to their heart’s content.

Virtual tours virtually place the viewer on the deck of your boat, right inside your gardens, sumptuous suites, boma, on the back of your safari vehicle, and so on, enabling them to engage with your content in a way that still photographs fall just short. Story-telling photographs certainly have a place too, but an interactive format can take the viewer that much further along the decision-making process.

By extension, the operators and travel agents want to sell your product/service in their itineraries, and they need your product content to become an attractive ingredient in the final presentation they make to their clients. In a sense, your VR content can help guide the buyer journey and facilitate the selling experience too.

Creating a digital sales process

Your target customer wants quicker responses to their questions, complaints, crises and comments. With Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp already well-known to so many consumers, you have a better chance of controlling who says what about your brand and your service. You never want your future guest to be more tech savvy than you are if you hope to inspire trust.

Using a messaging App closes the gap between direct contact and broad-based marketing: your client has the luxury of clicking through your awesome content share on a Facebook post and instantly message you about which day tour/activity or room they want to book.

Messaging positions travel suppliers to address queries on a real-time basis and nearly instantaneously, and it gives travel operations the opportunity to coordinate on-site efforts in new and powerful ways.

Jason Clampet

Because if your target customer has found you online, whatever site that is, you must ensure they find it easy enough to take appropriate action and that they get satisfaction within a reasonable amount of time.

What happens when you pitch your product to the Brazilian market, but interest drops off right at conversion point? It could be because your content isn’t available in Portuguese. Making it available in the preferred language of your target customers can go a long way to keeping them interested, on your site for longer.

Your client starts thinking about travel and wishing for more convenience. Where else can tech add value?

  • Digital check-in
  • Digital concierge service
  • Hook the up with useful destination information like local excursions, places of interest or attractions, restaurants, events, shopping options, local transportation, maps/directions.
  • Partner up with other travel or hospitality companies, entertainment venues or transport companies in your vicinity, and develop some lucrative add-on’s.

Enabling partnerships

For the sake of a healthy tourism industry, it works in everyone’s favour to share expertise and content, and to share the ride in the same boat. Imagine communicating with your trade partners what experiences you offer and enabling them to be more efficient at converting enquiries to sales… 

By taking control of your digital content and making it centrally accessible to the global trade where it is safely stored in the cloud, you can effectively take work out of their hands, put time back into their workday, and make life easier for them. If anything needs to change, the cloud absorbs your updates and spits out the fresh content live across all your digital outputs. It’s the foundation of collaboration with your trade partners.

Travel professionals will continue to deliver value as travelers swaps their DIY frustrations for the expert’s touch. Their role will become…more about being true collaborators who leverage relationships, networks and connections on behalf of their clients.

Amadeus

The last thing anyone needs is for old info to make the rounds, causing tour operators to continue trying to sell an expired product. Applying tech to this potential disaster can kick the old problem of fragmentation in the travel trade to the curb, to be born again as collaboration.

The demand for travel content will continue to increase and become more pressing – it’s a challenge to keep up. Keep checking in with technology to create a buying experience that qualifies your brand as a professional, progressive brand that future guests will want to check out.

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