Transforming Travel and Hospitality Experiences with Data and AI

We live in a world with more data than ever before. Every coffee we buy, website we peruse, and airline ticket we purchase generates data. Properly accessing, utilizing, and activating that data is getting harder and harder. This is especially true in the travel and hospitality industries.

In order to find success, travel and hospitality companies need the ability to access and activate their data so that it can be used to power decision-making, unlock productivity, and deliver highly personalized experiences. However in order to do that, they must learn how to effectively utilize, integrate, and derive value from the information at their disposal.

Today’s abundance of data poses a challenge to the travel and hospitality industry for three primary reasons:

1. There’s a lot of data and it’s disconnected. Each action that generates data must be stored and accounted for. However, this often leads to large amounts of data spread across various systems within an organization.
2. People have multiple identities across multiple channels. Travelers have duplicate profiles in different systems across an organization. This will only become more complex as we look toward a cookieless future of increased data and privacy regulations.
3. Customers are indifferent to these challenges. One in three loyal customers will now switch from brands that they love after even just one bad experience.

These are significant challenges that need to be addressed now. The future will be driven by groundbreaking innovations in artificial intelligence (AI), the insights derived from analytics, and the ability to track data in real time. This makes a travel or hospitality company’s ability to effectively organize and derive value from their data crucial to their future success.

Combining data from numerous sources enables travel and hospitality companies to gain new insights, harmonize and unify profiles, and engage travelers with precision across distributed channels. This includes marketing data, service data, and information kept in legacy or outdated systems.

The right tools and technology can help travel and hospitality organizations bring this data together to provide a real-time, unified view of each traveler across their entire travel experience. Automation and AI can enhance those experiences through data-driven, personalized recommendations.This enables travel and hospitality organizations to take advantage of real-time opportunities and ultimately deliver a more elevated, curated experience at scale.

The ability to deliver seamless experiences that engage travelers while also saving both time and money requires more than just a solid foundation of data. That data needs to work alongside automated processes and AI to continuously unlock personalization, drive operational efficiencies, and increase revenue per traveler.

Once this is in place, it will revolutionize the way travel and hospitality organizations do business across each and every department.

The first step for any organization is to derive significance from the data in their possession. In light of the underlying challenges, Salesforce provides hyperscale data stores and a first-class integration platform. This allows organizations to efficiently process and analyze their data and gain valuable insights that can drive informed decision-making. Additionally, Salesforce's integration platform enables seamless connectivity with other systems, ensuring a holistic view of the data across the organization. Working with certified partners who provide implementation guidance and preconfigured connectors for data retrieval allows IT teams to quickly access all their data effortlessly. This eliminates the necessity for cross-team delays or the laborious procedure of extraction, transfer, and loading (ETL). It also allows teams to effectively determine what attributes are actionable for users. This methodology ensures that data is synchronized and integrated in a way that works for the business.

Once this first step has been taken, departments across the organization can now take this data and use it to do things like personalize global experiences, create individualized marketing journeys, and empower executives with the information they need to make data-driven decisions at every single touchpoint.

It used to be that marketing teams had only one source of data to work with. Centralizing data in a single location means that marketers can now access relevant information across the organization both quickly and easily. This is a game changer when it comes to marketers’ ability to refine the who as well as the what: Who is their customer and what content might appeal to them? This goes beyond just personal preferences, it truly addresses the totality of each individual.

People are multidimensional, and knowing exactly what kind of content to send them can be complex. This is especially true in industries like travel and hospitality, when intent can shift quickly from corporate to leisure. How somebody appears at one moment in time can look very different the next. However, once marketers gain the ability to understand how travelers engage, they can send highly personalized, continuous content at scale. This provides a curated, elevated, and engaging experience that keeps customers coming back for more.

This is a level of intelligent marketing like never before. Marketers can pull up a dashboard containing a full catalog of data (including marketing sources, service sources, and legacy systems of data) all within one view. They can point-and-click, drag-and-drop, and build out segments on the fly. Multiple types of content can then be sent automatically in a way that both personalizes and optimizes each phase of the customer journey (and its inherent opportunities)—from planning to stay-cycle to loyalty. Customers in the midst of planning can be targeted with educational campaigns. Customers eligible for the company loyalty program can be sent information on how to join, notified about the perks available, or even receive a birthday reward with extra loyalty points. And customers who seem to have lost interest can be easily re-engaged or reactivated with personal promotions or references to past trips. This type of engagement makes people feel seen and cared for.

On-property guests can also be engaged in a more personally relevant manner. Companies can deploy a host of automated communications ensuring that guests have all the information they need for a successful stay. This can consist of personalized reservation confirmations, information about the local area, and digital check in/out options. And, because all of these actions are generated from a single system with access to all the data, it is easy to track and analyze what resonates and what doesn't, allowing companies to continue to optimize and refine the experience in real time.

This type of marketing not only drives business in the present, it puts travel and hospitality companies in a place to take advantage of future innovations as well. Generative AI capabilities are advancing rapidly, and organizations with a solid data foundation are not so far off from a future where marketers will be able to input the desired outcome of a segment and have generative AI construct a cohort accordingly, after which they would be given the option to execute the campaign across numerous channels of engagement.

Travel and hospitality companies are challenged with orchestrating personal experiences across multiple languages and time zones. When done well, this can be a huge differentiator in customer experience. However, the reality of doing this well can be difficult. Multilingual communications must be translated, versioned, and QA'd for factors like tone, slang, and localized content deployment and timing.

Text and email communications are just one facet of the customer journey. In order to effectively execute a multi-language strategy, travel and hospitality companies need to assure that they have thought through the entirety of the customer journey. This type of holistic consideration assures that they are delivering a seamless customer experience across all touchpoints. This includes providing localized websites and having customer support teams equipped with native speakers to address any inquiries or concerns.

An integrated platform that offers a comprehensive view of the customer has the ability to effectively track and optimize the entire customer journey at scale. Marketing teams can use automation to ensure a seamless and personalized experience for each customer. This not only enhances customer satisfaction, it also increases the likelihood of conversions and repeat business. Automation also allows for efficient analysis of customer data, enabling marketing teams to make data-driven decisions and further optimize their strategies for better results.

Ultimately, an integrated platform enables marketers to deliver a consistent experience while also ensuring that experience is being delivered in the moments that matter with the right content at the right time on the right channel.

A unified platform with a single view enables executives in leadership positions to make data-driven decisions at every touchpoint—all from a single dashboard.

This seamless integration of data and analytics enables executives to take action and/or make decisions quickly and efficiently. And because insights and recommendations are provided in real time, users can take these actions based on the changing needs of the business. This not only saves time, it also ensures that decisions are based on accurate and up-to-date information, which leads to better outcomes and improved performance.

Even further, real-time recommendations help executives identify trends and patterns in the data, enabling them to proactively address any potential issues or capitalize on emerging opportunities. By eliminating the need for manual calculations and providing a seamless user experience, the platform empowers executives to quickly respond to changing market conditions and stay ahead of the competition.

Today’s travel and hospitality companies face a unique challenge. They must deliver consistent experiences across multiple channels, countries, languages, and time zones. What’s more, customers demand that these experiences be both personalized and engaging. Doing this in an efficient manner requires a technology partner with the ability to provide solutions that make it possible for organizations to leverage and activate all the data at their disposal.

An integrated platform capable of providing a single view bolstered by automation and AI will not only help organizations unlock data, it will enable them to boost customer satisfaction, increase productivity, and drive business success.

Learn more about how Salesforce can help your organization harness the power of Data + AI + CRM