How teamwork helped Travel Republic transform its customer experience.

In the highly competitive online travel booking sector, repeat business is the holy grail. To win customers’ repeat bookings, businesses must ensure that booking travel is a simple, customer-focused experience, with service to match. The need for seamless customer experiences has been particularly important since the emergence of COVID-19, which has heightened tensions around travel.

This is something leading online travel agency Travel Republic knows well. Since 2003, the U.K.-based business has helped millions of customers book flights, hotels, transfers, and experiences, allowing them to build their ideal holiday. Prior to the pandemic, around 35% of these were repeat customers.

To continue to achieve its growth goals, the business recognized that it needed a single shared view of its customers across all touchpoints. This would allow it to better understand its customers, achieve better customer segmentation, and create personalized customer interactions.

Having assessed a variety of solutions, Travel Republic Managing Director Antonio Fellino turned to Salesforce for help with implementing a unified technology solution that would allow the company to look after its customers better. To enable it to more quickly realize value from the project, the company drew on expert guidance and support provided by Salesforce’s specialist support team.

Here are four lessons from Travel Republic’s digital transformation journey that you can use to reach your goals faster.

The customer experience has become an increasingly important differentiator for organizations of all kinds, but it’s particularly crucial in the volatile travel sector.

Travel Republic is using digital marketing automation to transform how it delivers customer experiences.

Marketing automation makes it easier to connect with consumers and deliver relevant, measurable, and optimized user experiences. This includes harnessing customer data — such as customer profiles, browsing and booking history, and user-generated reviews — to build personalized messaging journeys across customers’ preferred channels.

The company also plans to roll out additional features that will allow it to extract more value from its data, as well as segment and manage audience segments more effectively.

“Our customer success manager coordinated our SMEs and key stakeholders throughout the rollout,” said Fellino. “He really understood what we were trying to achieve as an organization, and provided the specialist support we needed to allow each of our product owners to move forward and achieve more with the solution.”