travel tech insights

Online product and services reviews have shifted transaction influence from the provider to the consumer, rewarding companies who deliver excellent customer service and experience, and making life difficult for those who don’t. Within the travel industry, TripAdvisor delivers millions of customer judgements across travel providers, all of whom recognize the value in keeping in the customer’s good graces.

However, not all travel websites apply the lessons and value of customer reviews to themselves, certainly providing consumers with travel provider reviews but not necessarily reviews for their own role in the customer’s travel experience process.

The beginning of the New Year is the perfect time to take a serious look at your travel technology; the holiday travel rush is over, the staff is back from holiday, a preliminary view of 2015 results is coming into focus and planning for 2016 is being finalized.

This look must be a serious one because: technology plays an increasingly important role in differentiating products and services within the travel marketplace; implementing new technology can be disruptive; and correctly evaluating an existing travel system along with other choices requires time and a sound process.

Who are the millennials and why are they important to your travel business? It’s certainly no problem finding articles identifying millennials by the numbers: did you know they check their smartphone 45 times a day, and are 50+% more likely to ditch search engines and email in favor of social networks to find brand content? Or that 44% of them praise or flame product and services experiences with text messages and 38% of them use social media to do the same?

In fact, millennials are a widely diverse group, and any implication it can be accurately characterized by various data points is misleading.Demographically speaking, the group is defined as those born between 1980 and 2000 – or 15 to 35 years old. Does any doubt fifteen year old girls check smart phones 45 times a day? Does anyone believe 35 year old men do the same? The age band is simply too broad to support general  assumptions about specific behaviors, not to mention it also covers the span in which people mature to adulthood: young adolescents go into the group and mature adults come out.

Based on the number of blogs I see on travel websites it seems as though the argument for their presence has been won.  The same holds true for most industries. With few exceptions, navigation bars will link to a blog. Some are easier to find than others, but look hard enough and you’ll usually find one. But, as a professional writer and blogger, I often find myself wondering why some websites appear to have let their blog drift, with posts seemingly unconnected by themes or uneven in format and content. That’s not meant as a negative comment from one writer to another, but an observation based upon professional experiences with a range of clients. The point of this blog is to share some of those experiences and a few lessons learned along the way.

The travel industry is witnessing a cross-current of demographics: on one hand, the Baby Boomer generation is retiring and leaving the work force; on the other hand, the millennial generation is entering the workforce and beginning to climb the income ladder. To a large extent, the way a travel company handles this transformation over the next ten years will determine its success. It will have to adroitly adjust to the changing travel habits – and budgets – of the graying boomers and become aware of – and knowledgeable about - millennial lifestyles and travel preferences. In some ways the challenge of millennial travelers is unique; certainly the influence of technology is unprecedented. But in more ways, it’s no different from what the travel industry faced when the boomers arrived decades ago; a new, significant, market requiring insight and innovation.