Enquiries, online searches, itineraries, car rentals, bus bookings, trains, flights, hotels, trip estimates, data, data, data! It is no wonder that we’re living in a world where data is the most dominant entity. In fact, the massive trails of it left by people, in other words, customers, are becoming the breadcrumbs that lead to glorious treasure troves that can be unlocked by businesses for wide-ranging purposes.
The biggest credit, without leaving any scope of doubt, is duly given to Big Data. But Big Data has an even greater role to play in the travel and tourism industry, which contributed a jaw-dropping USD 7.6 trillion to the global GDP only during the last year. If leveraged appropriately, Big Data has the potential to truly revolutionise the experience of vacationers across the globe. Let’s find out how.
High degree of personalisation:
Consider this: you search for multiple options simultaneously, but spend more time on a particular vacation. This indicates that you’re more inclined towards that specific offering. Big Data can analyse multiple similar factors, including specific behavioural patterns, which accurately gauge your preferences and extend to you the most premium offerings.
Through historic data such as feedback and social media analytics, Big Data can also help a business establish a deeper understanding of your specific requirements and further enhance the search results. All of that can be achieved through a state-of-the-art technological solution, eliminating the apprehension of prying eyes on your personal space.
An immersive travel experience:
Technologies such as image recognition can be conjoined with Big Data. They can, therefore, unlock avenues to analyse the vast amount of pictures uploaded on social media platforms, travel forums, as well as other data repositories. This can grant higher visibility with regards to tourist hotspots and help identify the most sought-after sites within a region, picturesque natural settings, or even a specific activity nearby – which can then be targeted to a vacationer through geolocation as per his or her individual preferences. This will offer an immersive travel experience to these vacationers and ensure that they make the most out of their travel escapades, rather than discovering later what they’ve missed!
Competitive pricing:
It is a well-known fact that the biggest factor that affects the end-result for a vacationer is the price point. And the travel industry, interestingly, has the most dynamic prices, not to mention the innumerable players involved in the market. This demands real-time updates of each and every offering corresponding to a platform’s own price for the same package. Failing to do so can deflect customers to the platform offering better prices – even if the difference is the bare minimum.
If there’s a dip in the competitor’s price, by leveraging appropriate data analytics, a business should respond immediately and offer a better price to the customer. Such insights can even enable a platform to identify specific features that their closest competitor fails to deliver and highlight these aspects for better traction.
Macrocosmic vs. Microcosmic Trends:
Where the traditional approach lags while catering to holidaymakers is that it targets every person based on the macrocosmic trends in the market. However, when a specific traveller is brought into perspective, these trends can make an absolute tangent to that particular individual. This approach, though draws a positive overall effect, has two basic disadvantages. Primarily, it fails to tap a large cluster of customers. Secondly, and more importantly, it delivers an unimpressive experience to the user which can have long-term negative consequences.
Big Data can, however, not only deliver a flawless customer experience but can also analyse the trends that are largely unaccounted for. Examples of these trends could be developing an interest in a particular tourist hotspot, or the increased interest in a particular region, city, or even a country because of some latest turn of events. This grants actionable insights to travel companies, which can then be leveraged to offer hand-crafted packages to vacationers. It can also lead to additions in the itineraries of existing tour packages which will inevitably tap this uncaptured market segment.
Given the increasing dependence on digital devices in our day-to-day life, the volume, variety, velocity, and veracity – the very building blocks of Big Data are also snowballing in terms of quantity. This has opened new-fangled dimensions for multiple industries, and the travel and tourism industry, the largest employment provider across the globe, stands to be the biggest beneficiary of this technological marvel.
—by Rajnish Kumar - CTO & Co-Founder of ixigo
