breakingtravelnews.com
27.04.2024
Hyper-personalisation: is 2024 the year it could finally happen?
When it comes to personalisation in the sale of travel products there’s personalisation, and then there’s ‘hyper-personalisation’ – knowing and catering to the traveller’s specific likes and whims, from what temperature they like their hotel room to what seat they prefer on a plane. As hyper-personalisation goes beyond the standard strategies used for personalisation, it involves a whole new style of segmentation that relies on harnessing unseen-before amounts of data. Much of it in real-time. With recent advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, travel companies may finally be in a position to offer this kind of service to travellers. We spoke with some travel technology experts to find out whether this is likely to happen any time soon and what the industry needs to do to prepare. So what’s the benefit for travel brands that manage to achieve this? Martin Eade from travel search and booking technology provider Vibe believes there’s a lot riding on this. “This is the holy grail of personalisation and the first company to get this right will have a real first mover advantage. After all, why would customers switch from a hotel or airline that can anticipate their needs before they even know them themselves?”. Perhaps you are wondering though what kind of technology is needed to make this work? Rubén Sánchez, CEO from leading hotel revenue management platform BEONx explains that the more travel companies are able to improve their knowledge of their guests through data analysis, the easier it will be to design hyper-personalized experiences that are adapted to the specific needs of each guest. “The aim is to create strategies that make each guest feel special and unique, instead of feeling like a faceless member of a generic market segment. But before companies can achieve hyper-personalisation, they need to shift their focus from the product to the client, developing a customer-centric strategy. Harnessing data will help them to understand exactly who their clients are, how they behave, and what they expect when they come to stay at a hotel, or travel on a specific airline.”