The Future of the Connected Traveler & Smart Travel Experience

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- The growth of 9% in 2014 to 23% in Q2 last year
- Mobile flight-related queries on Google.com are up 33% year over year, while mobile hotel queries are up 49%.

Example of a user researching a vacation over the 2 months
Mobile dominates the research process
How important mobile should be as an assisting platform on the attribution matrix

These numbers are likely not very surprising for a savvy crowd like yourself
I could have started with this slide and mentioned mobile is huge and it also would have resonated

- Ultimately as the owners of digital strategy (specifically in the travel space) one of our key goals is to reduce as much stress as possible during the guest journey

In my experience this how I generally see stress as it relates to the guest journey
As you get closer to time of travel / take off the stress continues to build
Key areas such as travel to the airport, at airport and all the way up until you’re sitting on the plane the stress continues to build
For some anxious travellers stress sky rockets even in-flight

This is a classic guest journey map as we see it from an airline travel perspective
As thorough as it looks with the 10 various stages I think there is opportunity for our digital and mobile strategy to focus even tighter

This chart is a study from Google from mid 2014 showing leisure vs. business traveller and confirms that mobile is important to all major parts of the guest journey
Leisure travellers used mobile 67% of the time vs. business travellers at 78%. This number likely now exceeds desktop today
Mobile is most heavily used during the actual travel phase for both leisure and business travelers

Micro Journeys are the smaller experiences we have between 2 major part of the travel journey. In this case between Dream and Research
As marketers and strategists are we truly understanding how our customers are interacting with experiences (especially via mobile) and are we part of the equation?
While watching TV, in-bed, chatting / sharing with friends, in the washroom

Again study from mid 2014 from Google
But really helps build my case for the Micro Journey between dreaming and researching
69% of people use smart phones during spare moments such as waiting and commuting
56% use mobile for travel inspiration while doing other activities, ie: watching TV, eating

Here’s the micro journey between “To the Airport” and “At the airport”
Customers have all sorts of key decisions with travel time, traffic, parking and mode of transportation. Mobile plays a huge role in all of these decisions.

Here’s the micro journey between “At the Airport” and “In-Flight”
Where are the gates located, where are the washrooms, how long are the security lines ups and will I make it to the gate on time, do I have time to make it to the lounge for a snack or finish some work
The integration of airports (via way finding and data services) into airline apps will continue to play a major role in this stressful part of the journey. London Gatwick - EasyJet

Communication, especially via mobile, is obviously immensely critical to any part of the travel journey
Users are communicating much differently even vs. 5 years ago

Before I make my point for some background whatsapp now has 1 Billion active users (as of Feb)
42B messages sent every day in 53 languages completely on mobile

This the overall Facebook ecosystem slightly older data than the previous slide
However Facebook messenger now has 800+ million users using it each month with the majority on mobile

With a variety of very dominant communication platforms we as the owners of the mobile and digital experience need to allow guests to communicate with us in the platform of their choice
Only having Contact Us Pages, Phone Numbers, Live Chats are platforms of the past
SparkCentral: Twitter/Instagram/Facebook do this already via smart routing with the ability for fairly large teams to collaborate
Unified Customer View to understand engagement and loyalty no matter how a customer wants to engage

Moving away from self-service into a revenue for a quick minute to look at opportunity with ancillary
Which for airlines is such a huge opportunity as we are a very low margin industry on our core product
$60B in ancillary revenue in 2015

- I am going to start with the traditional booking path for airlines but the concept should resonate with any type of travel provider and check out flow

Start with understanding intent – in this case we look at 6 key variables
Hence we offer a van, family insurance and options of condos knowing it’s Hawaii and we do this post booking so we can better guarantee the air ticket
Something we’re really looking at testing is can we improve the conversion of ancillary when we offer it at the right moment vs all ancillaries being offered all the time
Important of CRM / Analytics / Cross- Channel Data is so important
CRM / Cross-channel data for orchestration, loyalty and understanding of what interaction happened before or after
Analytics data for the real time UX customization

Looking at a mobile specific booking
We believe there is huge opportunity to offer ancillary post booking via push notifications or contextually in-app. In this example a booking was made >30 days out, @7 Days offer them hotel (based on the type of trip we’d even consider moving this to 24 hours ala hotel tonight), at 3 days offer car, and 24 hours offer a upgrade or Pre-reserved seat

Context is and will continue to remain ultra important
Knowing what stage a customer is in and further emphasizing the identification of this for them goes a long way to reducing stress
Both the Trip Case and Delta Apps do a really good job of calling this out. Trip case via their itinerary planner and Delta via their ‘Day of Travel’ part of their app

- A very intuitive strategy to deliver context is via cards, you saw Delta do it and here is United and the Google now app showing contextually relevant data in easy to digest information cards.

Understanding context
Go on journeys yourself, rather than traditional training why not book a trip where you take 3 different airlines and book 2 different hotel chains and 1 airbnb rental, with 1 car rental, 1 taxi experience and 1 uber. Take a close look at all of the various companies handle context and what do they do really make the experience seamless.

- In some cases travelling for leisure for business is very much the same and some cases it can be so different but again this provides you with a different angle of context to make fine tune your experiences

References:

https://skift.com/2015/11/10/airline-fee-revenue-expected-to-reach-nearly-60-billion-in-2015/
http://www.hopper.com/corp/insights/cheat-sheet-5-charts-that-show-the-biggest-airline-market-trends-in-2015
https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/articles/travel-trends-4-mobile-moments-changing-consumer-journey.html
http://www.tnooz.com/article/travelports-mtt-talks-mobile-app-strategy-for-tmcs-and-itself/
https://storage.googleapis.com/think/docs/2014-travelers-road-to-decision_research_studies.pdf

The Future of the Connected Traveler & Smart Travel Experience

Manoj Jasra

The Future of the Connected Traveler & Smart Travel Experience