Why do travel providers miss the mark on personalization?

The past few weeks on LinkedIn have seen some stimulating debate among us travel nerds on the topic of personalization and why it’s such a perplexing challenge in our industry.

For a market with so many user profile, purchase and behavior attributes to mine, the issue certainly isn’t lack of data. Particularly for the larger, established online travel agencies, airlines and accommodation providers, their data lakes are incredibly well‐stocked.

With the inexpensive computing power and artificial intelligence/machine learning tools available today, providers can fish for customers in those data lakes far more efficiently than ever before. So it’s not a process issue.

Why, then, am I getting Motel 6 ads in my Hotels.com results? And why does another traveler get an email titled “Travel recommendations just for you” featuring airfares to places he’s never expressed interest in from an airline he hasn’t flown with in five years?

Why does it take me at least three to four clicks to filter results on every search I do on Kayak or Expedia to curate what I want to see (4‐5 star, no apartments/motels/B&Bs/hostels/capsule hotels, etc.) – despite having a decades‐long profile of shopping and booking with both sites? They should know me well enough by now. Instead, they’re like that guy from the movie "Memento" who can’t remember anything.

Every time I search, I’m like a brand-new person to them.

Misguided motivation?

The truth is these sites have made an intentional business decision to NOT use their talent and resources to provide a more personalized experience for their users. They have all the brainpower, data and technology to do so, but they choose not to. 

The only logical explanation for this is that these travel providers believe they make more money being UN‐personalized than they would if they invested the resources to make a truly curated experience for their users. Expedia explicitly acknowledges this:

That seems really bizarre to me in this day and age, especially considering every other service provider I use has aggressively moved to a more personalized experience.

Amazon knows what I need before I do. Netflix and Spotify are pitch‐perfect with both their default recommendations (what they know I like) and their “discovery” suggestions (new stuff they suspect I will like).

StitchFix has done an incredible job leveraging data science that is layered on top of purchase, feedback and gamification inputs to create a hyper‐personalized personal stylist experience so that I never had to set foot in a mall again (check out their Algorithms Tour!). Virtually everything they present to me is stuff I consider “buyable.” I can’t say the same for the OTAs.

The end result is that I am an incredibly sticky customer for these providers. In the case of Amazon, Netflix and Spotify, they bill me every month and I pay without thinking about it. With StitchFix, they are the first (and usually last) place I go when I need something new to wear, so their share of my wallet is close to 100%.

Meanwhile, the OTAs and other travel suppliers continue to serve up an undifferentiated, mass‐market, one‐size‐fits‐all user experience, expecting us users to do all the manual labor to sort and filter and click our way into “personalized” results. That’s a lot of unpaid labor! Maybe we should unionize…

How it SHOULD work

A better approach makes the product do the work – not the user.

Investing in a product experience that makes use of all the data customers provide, either explicitly via profiles and preferences, or implicitly based on their purchases and actions, leads to a far more seamless and efficient shopping experience for users, and a shorter purchase funnel for providers.

• Let users define their own default for how results are filtered for display (e.g., star‐rating, property type, non‐stops, brands/alliances, etc.).
• Give users the option to save different searches for one‐click shopping (like Zillow does).
• Enable multiple personas that curate results accordingly with a single click, based on what the user defines for that persona (e.g., traveling on business, with kids, with my significant other, with my friends).
• Create a much richer customer profile by asking users about their preferences (like StitchFix’s Style Shuffle). It doesn’t have to be a gating factor to sign up or an IQ test to use; when done right, it builds the profile bit by bit over time, using gamification or other quick prompts.

Investing in the product experience to make it much stickier and more engaging for users makes for a much more loyal user base in the long run. Anyone who has spent time crafting their playlists on Spotify knows what I’m talking about … zero chance I’ll go through that again with someone else!

I’m sure I’m not alone in wanting to see someone finally tackle this personalization challenge in a truly customer‐first way, using the modern technology now available. With all the brainpower in our industry, from the OTAs to travel suppliers to the startups looking for a legitimately disruptive business idea, it shouldn’t take long.