After years of accelerated traveler demand, growth rates are starting to slow.

STR and Tourism Economics downgraded their 2019 forecast for the U.S. hotel industry at the beginning of the year, setting year-over-year demand growth at 1.9%, with a prediction of 1.7% growth in 2020.

This modest demand growth requires a shift in thinking for travel marketers, who will need to try a bit harder to win their share of wallet in a tightening market.

In an environment of flattening demand, it’s critical for travel marketers to commit resources to the most valuable groups of customers, those who not only spend the most today, but those who have the potential to spend the most in the future.

Some of these insights are available to marketers already, through booking and loyalty behavior, but a bigger commitment to knowing more about customers is needed to deliver truly relevant marketing.

Commit to really knowing your customers

Travel companies have a lot of traveler data: searching, booking, loyalty, customer service, even data from another travel brand, such as an airline partnering with a hotel.

But this data only provides one or two facets of a vibrant individual customer who may respond better to nature destinations over sports tourism, or family vacation packages over solo adventures.

Marketers need information that they simply can’t determine from passively gathered data alone. Determined broad information gathering is the right way to go.

For example, Wyndham partners with media publishers to gain insights from second party data.

Travel websites that Wyndham advertises with will share information about their audience’s browsing behavior, what articles they’ve read and even what brands they’re most interested in.

Wyndham combines this with third party data about general booking and travel behavior to round out a picture of an individual. With these robust insights, Wyndham creates personalized advertising campaigns that work much better than a generic message.

Travel brands can also implement a more creative data gathering program directly.

ReviewPro and GuestFolio are two of many hotel pre- and post- visit survey tools that hotels can customize to ask specific questions about preferences, hotel stays and more.

For example, asking a single question about what type of California getaway sounds most appealing, or what sweepstakes prize they’d like most. 

Isolate high-value travelers

Speaking of loyalty members, in 2017, Phocuswright's Travel Marketer's Guide to the U.S. Digital Landscape showed an interesting trend.

Elite loyalty members were much more likely to want and respond to personalization than lower tier members or travelers with no program affiliation.

This trend happened in a direct sliding scale; the higher the tier, the more they wanted and responded to personalization.

For many companies, the people that donate the most data are the ones that expect travel marketers to use it to create more relevant, timely offers.

Combine this with emerging trends of last minute bookings, combined business-leisure travel and mobile search, and travel marketers must combine data from their current programs with a broader spectrum of inputs to better understand each customer’s complex individual preferences.

Knowing more about each customer can provide travel marketers with a prioritization system to improve relevance for the most valuable people.

For example, scoring loyalty members not only by how many loyalty points they have, but also by how often they are active, or how they like redeeming points.

Customers can be scored by how often they book travel last minute, how often they cancel, upgrade, or complain.

These various elements of a customer relationship are all important indicators of customer health and can provide insights that marketers can use to trigger certain actions like personalized emails and special promotions. 

Marketers must not neglect potential customers in this pursuit. Not every valuable customer is already in a loyalty program, and might be waiting to hear from a new brand.

Using a wide array of inputs in a scoring system leaves the door open for brands to identify future value.

Make your brand stickier for your best customers

In a recent earnings call, Hilton reported a huge surge in new loyalty members, proving that there is always opportunity to grow these programs by offering something new, better, or more relevant.

The key, says chief financial officer Kevin Jacobs, is in getting these new members to book and stay. In other words, focusing on stickiness.

Delta got creative and mined a combination of customer feedback and baggage data to create a solution that allows customers to track their bags.

All they have to do is snap a picture of the luggage tag and they can keep tabs on their suitcase even if it heads in the wrong direction. This creative use of information gathering increases the personalized feel of the flight.

Many travel programs do a great job with providing different ways for members to redeem miles or points, but more often than not, they aren’t tailoring other elements of the program, such as messaging, which feel generic and sometimes totally irrelevant.

Even if 60% of passengers like a legroom upgrade, The Points Guy, prefers a window seat. Being able to tailor the types of upgrades customers value is one of many examples of how loyalty messaging could be made more relevant.

Travel giants have traditionally focused their loyalty programs to maximize efficiency across millions of customers.

Adding a few data-driven elements to the program could help with customer loyalty in the long term, even if it does add some complexity.

Travel brands are interacting with customers that have less time, less patience and more choice. It’s easy for them to ignore messages, or pick a competitor.

Focusing on the tactics that ensure relevance requires long term investment and commitment to a data-driven approach that is flexible enough to incorporate the unique differences in each customer relationship over time.