5 ways to fuel a winning customer experience in travel

Standout customer service has long been a way for travel brands to drive customer acquisition and repeat business. 

The world is changing, though, and traditional standards for satisfaction and experience are no longer enough.

With an array of options at their fingertips, customers expect more. Travel suppliers need to offer products and services that resonate on a deeper, more personal level.

The best way to stand out is to get personal - often starting before the customer even books. While ancillary products are not a new concept, the sophistication with which they are merchandised has entered new territories thanks to artificial intelligence-led innovations.

Driving accelerated, sustainable growth while delighting customers is a complex puzzle.

Allianz Partners is a global leader in travel and specialty insurance. Here are five critical lessons they've learned as they balance art with science and technology with empathy to help partners produce meaningful customer experiences.

1. Context delivers value

To keep customers coming back for more, successful businesses treat each customer as an individual - providing the best products for their situation. After all, the travel industry is about providing customers with one-of-a-kind journeys. But how can travel suppliers provide unique experiences for every customer during the pre-booking and booking journey?

Imagine two different customers, both planning trips, both in need of travel insurance. The first is a dad planning a family vacation to New York City. He’s tasked with the responsibility of making travel arrangements for his wife and kids. Last minute, the grandparents decide to tag along too. He’s struggling to keep the trip within budget, and he’s worried that something could go wrong.

Now, imagine a bride-to-be planning the perfect honeymoon getaway. This is the experience of a lifetime. Since it’s just her and her partner, she’s willing to spend a little extra cash. She’s excited, but a little wary - she’s heard that her tropical destination is prone to hurricanes this time of year.

Would these customers have similar purchase patterns? 

Of course not. No two customers have exactly the same needs. Even the same customer has different needs in different scenarios.

During the booking experience, travel suppliers can derive a great deal of insight about a customer’s needs. Each piece of data helps establish and understand customer cohorts. Within each cohort, data can curate specific offers. These offers aren’t just based on the products that best fit the customer’s needs. They also ensure that the offer uses the most relevant messaging and design. This helps drive product understanding, customer experience and revenue growth.

Take, for example, a guest making a hotel reservation. Simple context such as seeing multiple adults and children included in a reservation may indicate family travel. Offering products like roll-away beds, only SUV rentals, passes to local attractions and a robust travel insurance plan may generate additional ancillary conversion. However, a guest with elite-level status may be more inclined to upgrade rooms or pay for additional assistance and concierge services. With more information comes more insight.

Booking date, trip length, loyalty status and more can all help fine-tune offers.

2. It’s about harmonizing the experience

Planning a trip can be stressful. After spending hours sifting through flights, hotels, tours and tickets, it’s easy to get decision fatigue. Merchandising an ancillary product shouldn’t make things more complicated. Brands can create awareness, provide understanding of value and facilitate decision-making without adding to customers’ confusion.

Travelers’ decision-making can change depending on which phase of the journey they are in. From dreaming, to planning, to booking, to travel, customers weigh the importance of different aspects of their trip based on changing balances of rational and emotional thinking. Awareness, inspiration and education should be placed appropriately throughout the journey, helping build customers’ confidence to book along the way. Taking a holistic view of a customer journey helps illustrate the characteristics of each customer, their trip and their concerns. 

To address customers’ concerns, pick partners with a broad portfolio of solutions. But without understanding how to connect those solutions at the right time, in the right placement, and with the right message, a broad portfolio is irrelevant. How can travel suppliers provide the most relevant solution to consumers? Enter technology.

For Allianz Partners, the key is a state-of-the-art, proprietary e-commerce booking platform known as Allianz Fusion that integrates directly into partners’ booking paths. The platform uses machine learning to provide each customer with the most relevant insurance offer, personalized to their reservation - all within a fraction of a second. Conducting nearly 20,000 experiments, we have learned how to use technology to complement what humans do best.

3. An embedded purchase experience is a seamless one

When setting ancillary product strategy, there is a balance: empower consumers with options but avoid burdening them with too many choices. Consumers are expecting to be able to customize and enhance their experiences in the ways they want - they may not always know exactly what they want, but they no longer accept that one size fits all. Providing a seamless purchase experience is key to winning over customers and to keeping them coming back. If a customer feels overwhelmed, they may bypass the options, or worse, the booking, altogether.

Humans are inherently great at coming up with new ideas and looking at bigger pictures, but we are no match for the speed at which machines can interpret data and help make decisions. Each booking could easy generate upwards of 100 to 200 data points of direct or derived data about the trip, the traveler, ancillary purchases, purchase history and loyalty, as well as insights on bookings not yet completed.

Distilling insights and actions from billions of datapoints and customer actions is impossible for any human, much less in real time. Luckily, AI provides the perfect application. But all that cutting-edge technology still relies on a very human element: telling an easy-to-understand story that shows the real value of the solution to a customer’s problem.

4. Optimizing for travelers, not transactions

Brands should see customers first as travelers, not transactions. That is one of the keys to relating to customers before trying to offer them solutions. Focusing on providing an excellent customer experience drives customer value - and it’s simply the right thing to do.

When approaching the subject of optimization, start with a strong test-and-learn culture and let customers have a voice. In ancillaries, this can include product offerings, ordering, positioning, copy, design and UI/UX functionality. But beyond deciding what to test first, the most important step is choosing KPIs. It’s not just about earning quick revenue with an easy-to-add offer during the reservation process. Consider customer experience and long-term benefits for a transparent, refreshing and easy-to-complete process.

Allianz Partners dedicates a team of more than 50 experts to powering technology with heart. By putting ourselves in customers’ shoes, we develop relatable offer messaging and creative solutions to feed their robust optimization program. This willingness to learn through experimentation should be a part of any company’s DNA. Not every experiment will “win,” but all experiments provide valuable insight. These insights, and the data that come with it, are key to sustainably accelerating growth and delighting customers.

5. Putting it all together

When businesses find friction-free ways to make customers happier, it’s a game changer. Customer satisfaction leads to larger customer lifetime value gains, better competitive advantages and long-term growth prospects. 

By using data already at their disposal, businesses can anticipate market trends, identify pain points and innovate new ways to reach customers. But customers aren’t just data. Programs like Voice of the Customer can collect customer sentiment while providing feedback and resolution points for customers in need. The combination of robust product portfolios, strong partnerships, leading distribution technology and industry experience can come together to provide something truly personalized.

A traveler may not even realize that the product has been personalized for them, and that’s OK. Deciding to offer products that make a meaningful difference when customers need them most will have an impact on brand loyalty and customer value. Through optimization, any booking journey can provide products at the right price, with the right solutions and at the right time. And the right partner helps deliver in those moments that matter - those moments when it is not just about selling, but providing the service customers deserve.

Conclusion

With constant testing and innovation, the travel industry can adapt to changes as they’re happening, not after. Thanks to the innovative nature of AI, a powerful optimization program doesn’t just help you get ahead. It helps you stay ahead - and it accelerates over time. As programs like Allianz Partners’ learn from data, booking path experiences become more and more attuned to customer needs - increasing the chances of satisfied customers. 

Travel suppliers are determined to provide better and better one-of-a-kind journeys. With the right tools and strategies, that can include every part of the experience, even booking. If you integrate optimization through every part of the customer journey, customers will appreciate you for it - and they’ll return for more.