Transactional emails in travel: The good, the bad and the ugly

With almost everyone planning travel for the Spring and Summer holiday season, there is a slew of booking-related transactional emails flooding inboxes everywhere.

Digital travel sales are approaching $700 billion per year worldwide, so airlines, hospitality providers and online travel agencies are obviously very good at acquiring and converting customers, creating some of the most forward-thinking and memorable marketing campaigns going. 

It’s a fact of life that the travel industry’s emails are highly effective, full of professionally taken photos, enticing copy, and irresistible last-minute deals.

But once consumers have booked a trip, the likelihood of receiving a really bad transactional email at some point between booking and departure is far too high. 

It doesn’t have to be that way.

Transactional emails can, and should, be both functional and beautiful, but there’s a larger issue at play here.

The travel and hospitality industry realizes significant profit through upsell and cross-sell offers but enterprises lose money daily by failing to use transactional emails to fully leverage maximize those opportunities.

With the right tools and the right processes — and with buy-in from all the teams who have a stake — tapping into that vast potential is easier than you think.

Every last one of those horrible emails is a lost opportunity 

According to the Epsilon's Q3 2018 Email Trends and Benchmarks report, travel industry-triggered emails showed the highest open rate of all verticals, at 71.5%. That’s over 10% higher than consumer services telecom, which was a distant second at 59.6%. 

The click-through rate, however, was less impressive, with travel and hospitality coming in third place (7.6%), behind consumer packaged goods (11.1%) and consumer services (8.1%). 

A click-through rate of 7.6% for triggered emails might sound great compared to the 3.3% travel marketing emails saw in the same quarter, but it’s much less so when compared to clicks for either consumer services or consumer packaged goods. 

It’s crucial to consider the fact that when someone books travel online, they’re excited, they’re engaged, they’re hungry for more information about their itinerary and their destination.

And they’re ripe for upgrade and add-on offers, as well as for further engagement through content, social sharing, reviews/feedback, and referrals.

So when considered in that context, a 7.6% click-through rate is a pretty good indication that many of those emails offer very little added value.   

To give you a sense of what I’m referring to, as well as to offer some ideas about how they might improve, let’s take a look at some examples of both good and bad transactional emails from the travel and hospitality industry.

The good

Airbnb has always been on top of its transactional email game.

Like the example shown below, the company's emails are always meticulously on-brand, with beautiful images and a clean, uncluttered layout that accurately reflects the look and feel of the website experience.

The message itself includes everything the customer needs to know about their booking — where, when, who the host is, how much has been paid versus how much remains owing, and a clear CTA to view the full itinerary.

But Airbnb goes even further to not only include links to change the reservation, contact the host, or contact Airbnb support, they also include referral offers and links to add-on "experiences" — in other words, revenue-generating offers. 

There’s enough included in the email that the user doesn’t need to click through if they don’t want to but the options provided are engaging and offer value, without crossing the line into ‘overwhelming’. 

The bad

This boarding pass email from WestJet, the Canadian airline, is far from horrific but it could definitely use some improvement.

A good place to start is with the subject line — "e-BP HNL-YVR (VNYIQW)" is meaningless to anyone who doesn’t work for the airline.

You can’t see it here but there is no "From" name to help, just a generic and unrecognizable email address. A more user-friendly approach would be to make both the subject line and "From" name meaningful to the customer. (A good example of that is Uber’s highly specific subject lines: "Your Thursday morning trip with Uber")

It’s also an approach that would help the email avoid the Spam folder.

In today’s competitive marketplace, where exceptional customer experiences are becoming a key differentiator between brands, an email from a "no-reply" address is at odds with any claim of customer-centricity.

WestJet doesn’t just use a "no-reply" address, they open the body copy with the bolded statement, "This is an automated email. Please do not reply." And to add insult to injury, the email provides no alternative option to contact the airline with questions. 

While the email content does include the flight number, departure date and time, and ticket number, the customer has to open the boarding pass to find everything else — the originating and destination airports, the seat number, the boarding group, and, perhaps most importantly, the terminal and gate number.

The email body doesn’t even include WestJet’s company name — it appears only on the boarding pass and as part of that generic "from" email address.

If all the pertinent information (none of which is PII, by the way) had been included in some combination of the subject line, preheader, and within the email itself, the customer would only need to open the attachment to clear security and to actually board the plane. 

But most significantly, this email could generate revenue. All that would be required would be for WestJet to include information about baggage (i.e. do you need to pay for a checked bag?), in-flight food options (i.e. pre-purchase your dinner or upgrade your free meal), or in-flight entertainment choices (i.e. TV is free but you can pre-purchase movies now).

The one bright spot with this email is the fact that the attached boarding pass is a JPG image. Most airlines either attach a PDF boarding pass or provide a link to a digital version online, neither of which are the easiest to open on mobile devices. This JPG, on the other hand, opens fast, with a single click, each and every time. 

The Ugly

Here’s another example of a boarding pass email but one that’s far worse than WestJet’s.

This is not to single Air Canada out by any means — many airlines, both bigger and smaller, send millions of similar emails every day.

To put it bluntly, the email is ugly. It’s plain text with zero branding and full URLs rather than hyperlinks. Like the WestJet example, it’s also from a  "no-reply" email address but unlike that example, it doesn’t address the customer by name.

It actually doesn’t include any kind of greeting at all. But Air Canada does at least provide a link to the support site. 

Air Canada’s boarding pass is neither a JPG nor a PDF. It’s a link to a digital boarding pass that opens in a browser, meaning that in order to open it, the user’s device has to be connected to the internet.

Airports are notorious for unreliable wifi and cell service, so trying to open a link in a browser at either Security or the gate can be an iffy proposition. An attachment can at least be downloaded ahead of time and opened without an internet connection.

Granted, Air Canada does provide a printable version but that version can’t be used digitally, nor can the digital version be printed. How confusing is that? 

But beyond the less-than-optimal choice to include a link to an online boarding pass, there’s absolutely no reason this email can’t be properly branded HTML.

At the very least, even without offering any extras, the email should reflect the look and feel of the airline’s website. Consumers expect that kind of consistency and off-brand experiences, like this one, can erode trust and negatively impact loyalty. 

Finally, just like WestJet, Air Canada provides absolutely nothing with any revenue-generating potential. Neither email includes any kind of CTA besides the boarding pass itself.

WestJet does include a text link to basic information about check-in and baggage drop-off, but neither airline includes any kind of cross- or upsell offer.

There’s no offer to purchase onboard entertainment, pre-select a meal, or join the airline’s loyalty program. There’s isn’t even a link to content about the destination or an enticement for the customer to consider booking another flight or vacation package. 

Like all transactional messages, a boarding pass email is prime real estate for any of those offers, among others.

But as they are, with nothing to further engage the customer, both of these emails are dead-ends. And that makes them missed opportunities that lose these airlines significant revenue.