predictive travel creating optimal experiences …...predictive travel creating optimal experiences...

P R E D I C T I V E T R A V E LCreating optimal experiences through data consolidation and machine intell igence

2 | Rocket Fuel Institute | Predictive Travel

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Creating the Ultimate Journey ........................................................................................................................................................................... 3

Telling a Travel Story: Co-Creating a Unique, Immersive Experience for Every Traveler ................................................................8

Capitalizing on Digital Transformation: Data, Artificial Intelligence, and Personalization Create the Predictive Business .11

ActIng with Agility: Breaking Down Information Barriers to Create a Seamless Customer Experience .................................. 18

Becoming a Predictive and Cognitive Business .........................................................................................................................................20

Taking Off into a More Dynamic Future .........................................................................................................................................................23

Five Strategic Imperatives for Predictive Travel .........................................................................................................................................24


Imagine that you are booking business travel at

some point in the future. Your personal assistant,

a descendant of Siri or Alexa, notices by looking

at your calendar that you haven’t taken a leisure

vacation in almost a year.

“It’s time to plan your annual holiday vacation,”

your assistant reminds you. “You have 7 vacation

days remaining. This is a good time to book.

Flights and hotels are beginning to fill up. Would

you like to plan a trip?” Your assistant suggests

the beach or a ski trip, based on web searches,

articles, social media browsing, and retail activity

on your household devices over the past six

months. You decide to take the family skiing.

“Can I share your information with a few travel

partners?” Your assistant asks. You say yes, and

your assistant is off and running to find your

perfect trip.

With your permission and some ideal time

frames, your assistant does some research

and comes back with two options that fit your

predefined preferences—luxury, family-friendly,

and within a few hours’ flight from your home.

You can book a large condominium, or, using

your high number of hotel points from your

business travels, you can book a family suite in a

centrally located resort. Your assistant provides

a virtual-reality tour of both options, as well as

several reviews culled from social media. You opt

for the family suite.

Using frequent-flier miles from your preferred

carrier, your assistant procures four premium-

economy seats close to the front of the plane,

where you prefer to sit. Just like that, your trip is

booked.

CREATING THE ULTIMATE JOURNEY

The way that we plan and enjoy travel is on the verge of becoming an incredible journey.

The preceding scenario may seem out of reach by today’s technology standards, but it’s really not that far off. Within the next decade, mobile apps and eventually digital assistants that exist on smartphones and in-home devices may be able to leverage a wealth of data to deliver highly personal travel experiences unlike anything we’ve seen before. This information will include everything from partnership data from hotels, airlines, and online travel agents (OTAs) such as Expedia and TripAdvisor, to social media recommendations, to transactional data from household IDs.

Today, by harnessing and leveraging the enormous amount of traveler data that exists, travel providers can already better spot stage-gate signals to help not only deliver exceptional, highly personalized experiences from moment to moment, in real time, but also predict and anticipate what a customer wants at any given moment, making anyplace and anytime the “right place at the right time.”

Digital technologies power almost every step of the consumer path to purchase across all industries. The explosion of online commerce, the advent of mobility, and efficiencies driven by programmatic marketing have created a wealth of opportunities for travel brands to leverage intent-based audience data, enabling them to invest more strategically to influence that purchase path through today’s omnichannel digital world, driven by mobile devices, laptops, and, increasingly, the IoT.

Travel is no exception. Booking travel is no longer a phone-based, one-and-done experience. Consumers are constantly researching, learning, and making their opinions heard about destinations, transportation brands, resorts, activities, and attractions. Their actions on connected

devices create a wealth of data. Savvy brands understand the many facets of consumer data, and how to learn from this data and use their findings to optimize brand messages, pricing, and even the products and services offered, in an effort to drive loyalty and repeat business. This practice is now a way of life in which the brands that will thrive and remain top-of-mind will be those that can deliver the most satisfying value, and, as cognitive technologies come into fruition, communicate the promise of a specific emotional experience in a vertical that is highly personal and driven by human emotion. The emotional wellbeing of a customer may become a key performance indicator (KPI) as important as bookings or upsells.

We’re already headed in that direction. Walt Disney World’s “magic” wristbands provide a seamless experience for park visitors, granting entry to everything from rides to hotel rooms. But they also provide Disney with valuable information about where visitors are spending time—their favorite rides, places to eat, areas of the park, even favorite characters—data that the parks can use in turn to further streamline and sweeten the traveler experience with personalized enhancements. In fact, Disney’s rival, Universal Orlando, is upping the magic wristband game with its new TapuTapu wristbands for its Volcanic Bay water park. The bands will allow guests to reserve places in line for popular rides, but will also offer basic two-way communication with wearers, vibrating when ride times are approaching and triggering water features throughout the park.1

Vail Resorts uses RFID technology with ski passes to power its EpicMix app, which logs everything from distance skied to location around the company’s vast ski resorts. Skiers can enjoy the gamification aspects of the app, earning badges

1 “ Is Disney World’s Top Rival About to Make Magic Bands Obsolete?” The Motley Fool, November 5, 2016



for runs attempted and vertical feet traveled, or tracking progress in ski school, while the resort gleans valuable customer data.

Some companies are using technology to help during travel. Delta uses RFID technology in bag tags so flyers can see where their bags are located in real time.2 Virgin employs Apple iBeacon sensors to alert travelers to special airport discounts and provide boarding alerts.3 Starwood offers its Starwood Preferred Group (SPG) members keyless check-in, where they can use a mobile app to bypass the reception desk, go straight to the room, and open the door with their smartphones.4 Several airlines are enabling customers to rebook their own flights via mobile app, without needing to wait on the phone or even talk to an airline representative—and most important, without paying high rebooking fees.5

There is value in enhancing the travel experience for customers through convenient apps and services, but the real future value for brands will be in leveraging the data from these moments to further optimize customer experience, and leveraging this data across brands and partnerships. In fact, in this era of instant gratification and personalized experiences, consumers expect no less. Antiquated “spray and pray” marketing tactics will no longer work with today’s sophisticated consumers. Plus, in travel, even more than in other industries, there is a tremendous opportunity to provide highly personal, emotional, and memorable experiences within a trip, even with anonymous consumer and household data. By the very nature of travel, providers can—and should—get closer to the emotions and needs of their consumers.

FROM POINT A TO POINT E (EXCEPTIONAL)Just as brands that aspire to evolve to a more heightened sense of customer awareness will want to identify and choose the right data points, so they will also learn to cherry-pick the consumers that will gain the most value from their products and services, and the experiences they can offer.

2 “Delta first airline to use baggage tracking app,” ABC News, November 14, 2016

3 “Virgin tests Apple’s iBeacon at Heathrow,” ZDNet, May 1, 2014

4 “What it’s really like to use Starwood’s Keyless Entry,” Travel + Leisure

5 “ Airlines, Now More Proactive on Weather, Allow Fliers to Shift Own Travel Plans,” The New York Times, January 2, 2017

With the right data, brands can determine optimal experiences and carefully curate travel choices for customers, from the ideal flight and hotel package at the right price to meticulously researched and targeted recommendations for restaurants and attractions. The technology exists now for companies to use transactional data and machine learning to inform real-time decisions across paid and owned media channels in a way that seems intuitive and predictive. It’s just a matter of analyzing transactional moments and data points to gather insight, enabling brands to deliver satisfaction with pinpoint accuracy. In time, developments in natural language processing (NLP) and machine-to-machine communication, as well as the increasing speed of processing and analytics, will enable the kind of personal assistants we envision in our scenario. Artificial intelligence (AI) that enables unique customer service delivery will take on a more human demeanor.

However, most brands are still in the early stages of predictive marketing. The information exists and presents a tremendous opportunity—in 2015, travelers embarked on 1.7 billion domestic leisure trips6 and 488 million business trips,7 and the average annual 2015 travel budget in a United States household was $8,700, according to TripAdvisor.8 Millennials represent an enormous audience for travel and experiential purchases, and they are influencing everyone else. This opportunity is all the more reason to start now. Companies that are able to harness this data and use it to better target customers with tantalizing offers and exceptional service are seeing tremendous results. The technology exists to support a path to a more informed and predictive way of doing business. The benefits are too huge to wait. [Leisure business graphic]

6 U.S. Travel Association, U.S. Travel Answer Sheet

7 “ Business Travel Spending to Rise Nearly 5 Percent in 2015, But ‘Erratic’ Economic Drivers Limit Growth,” Global Business Travel Association, July 5, 2015

8 TripAdvisor, TripBarometer Study, 2015


Still, attempts to analyze, identify, and connect with travelers have been uneven at best. In one given month, 28 percent of travelers who booked a vacation were misidentified as business travelers in one or more third-party data segment, and 30 percent of travelers who booked a business trip were misidentified as leisure travelers9 in one or more third-party data segment. Misidentification of business and leisure travel results in waste and lost opportunities in as much as 50 percent of budgets on messaging the “wrong” kind of trip. Companies also end up misallocating ad spend to target loyalists to another brand, the audience least likely to convert. This lack of success in identifying travelers and exceeding their expectations boils down to three things. First of all, many travel companies are not yet successfully harnessing and leveraging the enormous and exponentially growing amount of data on customers, especially first-party data. Second, many lack the sophisticated processing power to analyze and deliver insight on that data. Third, many lack the ability to take that insight, act on it, and deliver results in real time. It’s a recipe for the wrong offers to the wrong people at the wrong time.

9 Rocket Fuel internal data

Are these offers always wrong for these respective travelers? Not necessarily. A business traveler with a household full of influencers who want to go to Walt Disney World might jump on the right offer. Under the right circumstances, a low-cost offer that includes several added perks might persuade a brand loyalist to jump ship. But without enough data and analysis to determine if that’s the case, such offers are as effective as a shot in the dark.

Travel and hospitality companies need a predictive marketing platform that can leverage the wealth of first-party data they have on customers and prospects, including curated social data from websites, mobile apps, and social networks. An artificial intelligence platform with machine learning capabilities can process and learn from this data, giving companies the insights they need to become truly predictive when it comes to the unified IDs in their sphere, understanding preferences, anticipating needs, and making nearly every offer and gesture special and irresistible. Today, these predictive platforms at hotels and airlines can influence direct booking, enabling these brands to collect more data and analyze and optimize in an infinite feedback loop. And in the future, as in our initial scenario, they can possibly help intelligent agents and assistants leverage partnerships with these brands to deliver a seamless, start-to-finish travel experience for the customer.

There are three macro themes driving the future of predictive marketing in travel. By making the right investments in time and technology, travel brands who understand these themes will find themselves in a position to thrive in the rapidly evolving new landscape.

0.0

0.5

1.0

1.5

1.7 billion domestic

leisure trips

488 million business trips

IN 2015

Source: Rocket Fuel Internal Data


TELLING A TRAVEL STORY: CO-CREATING A UNIQUE, IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE FOR EVERY TRAVELERToday’s consumers acquire experiences like they used to acquire material goods. Every traveler wants a trip that’s unique, where they are immersed in their surroundings, where they live like locals in the best possible way. Providing that type of emotional connection is both a challenge and an opportunity for today’s travel brands, and that connection is being made more and more with the help of human-like technologies such as NLP.

CAPITALIZING ON DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION: DATA, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, AND PERSONALIZATION CREATE THE PREDICTIVE BUSINESSHow do you collect and interpret literally trillions of transactional moments from travel consumers? Artificial intelligence is the only way—but only when combined with a wealth of data and the emotional intelligence of human decision making. Human experience is a critical component in an industry as highly personal and emotional as travel and hospitality, and it’s through human experience that we can enhance the humanity of chatbots and assistants, making these technologies more intuitive guides to bolster customer experiences.

ACTING WITH AGILITY: BREAKING DOWN INFORMATION BARRIERS TO CREATE A SEAMLESS CUSTOMER EXPERIENCETravel is an industry full of information barriers—barriers that prevent associates from responding quickly to customers, as well as multiple, siloed platforms for booking, planning, and interacting with staff at your destination. The fewer barriers that exist, the faster and more seamlessly you can fulfill customer desires.

The shift in how we deliver experiences and the quality of these experiences will be driven by self-learning systems that get better at tasks over time and get better at processing your information and communicating with you, in your language. Imagine a recommendation system that, rather than recommend products or cars, can recommend destinations and experiences based on your input and interests and the places you’ve been before. Imagine a smartphone app that lets you order a poolside drink, then remembers your favorite drink the next day when you arrive. But equally as important, imagine these apps and systems talking to you, and “listening,” acting more as assistants and peers through NLP and other technologies.

Automation workflows that enable these kinds of breakthroughs are being elevated by technologies powered by machine learning and artificial intelligence. AI is already disrupting countless industries by eliminating menial tasks and repetitive queries, enabling more accurate and meaningful personalization standards that elevate brand value and create more resonant, memorable experiences that stand out along the customer journey.

Intelligent and connected customer experiences are all centered around a framework in which AI in the future will separate the signal from the noise; determine what will make a message more resonant; identify what experiences and offers are important to specific audiences at both individual and household levels; know exactly what packages to offer to what consumers at what times; and figure out how to make the delivery of services and experiences so seamless both in planning and on vacation that it resembles telepathy more than customer service. AI will transform the travel industry as it is transforming all industries, and change the way we connect with brands and each other. Technologies such as IBM Watson and DeepSpeech 2 will tap into the emotion that exists around travel to help bring unprecedented levels of trust and synergy between brand and consumer, deepening and enhancing experiences for the consumer while strengthening the brand.


Upon arrival at your ski destination, you check

into your hotel to find your favorite glass of wine

waiting for you, as well as hot chocolate for the

kids. Thanks to easy preplanning tools and your

digital personal assistant, your rented skis are in

your ski locker, your kids’ lessons are booked for

the week, and you have dinner reservations at a

local pizza place.

The next day, you drop off the kids for lessons,

and you hit the slopes. Around lunchtime, your

resort app alerts you that your kids are skiing

nearby and will have lunch at the lodge at mid-

mountain. You ski over to watch your kids and

cheer their progress, then join them for lunch.

At lunch, you each show off the badges you

have earned for your achievements and runs

completed throughout the day and your overall

status compared with others on the mountain.

After lunch, the app gives you a list of five

“secret” runs, chosen by longtime ski instructors,

that you shouldn’t miss based on your ski day so

far. You and the kids take several photos of the

fun and the views, and post them to the resort’s

social networking pages and online app to share

with others.

Travel has always been an experiential endeavor, with travel and hospitality companies striving to give vacationers a memorable journey. But it used to be a whole lot easier. Gone are the days of travelers booking a hotel, flight, and car, enjoying a standard itinerary, and taking pictures next to the same monuments as everyone else. Today’s travelers are searching for exceptional experiences that they can claim as their own. People want the insider’s tour of destinations, following activity and restaurant recommendations they’ve “discovered” on Instagram or TripAdvisor from other like-minded travelers. Their ultimate goal is to experience a destination like locals. “They don’t consume the destination and culture,” says Shannon Knapp, CMO for Leading Hotels of the World (LHW). “They actually want to become a part of it.”10 This is borne out in the slogan for one Airbnb ad campaign: “Don’t Go There. Live There.”

THE “CURIOUS TRAVELER”Knapp and LHW even have a name for this new breed of vacation maverick: The Curious Traveler. According to Knapp, travel “is not what they do. It’s who they are.”

“Their travels are really a journey of self-discovery and empowerment, and they get that through exploration and discovery of new experiences, cultures, people, etcetera.”

10 “Skift CMO Interviews: How Leading Hotels Targets the ‘Curious Traveler,’” Skift, April 14, 2016

TELLING A TRAVEL STORY: CO-CREATING A UNIQUE, IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE FOR EVERY TRAVELER


These are travelers who would rather go to an obscure but acclaimed restaurant in Harlem in New York than a Broadway play or the Empire State Building, or who would rather rent a house in a small Mexican village than retreat to a giant resort complex in Florida. While the Curious Travelers of the survey are luxury travelers of all ages, their profile closely matches that of another group that is transforming the travel industry—millennials. Seventy-eight percent of millennials spend their money on experiences over possessions, according to a recent Harris poll. On social media, 42 percent of the posts on a typical millennial’s timeline are travel-related. Millennials are 23 percent more likely to travel abroad, and 60 percent of American travelers ages 18 to 34 put their faith in sharing-economy services such as Airbnb, HomeAway, Uber, and Lyft rather than traditional hotels and transportation.11

11 “ Travel advertising flies into a mobile future with Millennials,” Salesforce blog, November 30, 2015

In short, today’s travelers are empowered, in search of the extraordinary, and this type of traveler isn’t going away anytime soon. Just like their consumer counterparts in retail, they are not going to settle for average customer service, and, as in retail, they have plenty of choices. If one brand doesn’t make the grade, they are on to the next one. Loyalty programs and their millions of points are losing their appeal. Personalized service, in the moment, is taking the place of frequent flyer miles earned from year after year of diligent loyalty from the consumer. It’s no longer up to the consumer to prove loyalty—it’s up to the brand to deliver surprise and delight to stand out in a crowded field.

Social media is also making a difference in today’s travel experience. An astounding 97 percent of millennials post about their travels on social media.12 Social media influences travel before, during, and after a trip. Fifty-nine percent of travelers use TripAdvisor reviews as research,13 and 54 percent use photos and videos on social networks.14

More than any ad or brand, travelers trust other travelers to tell them the truth about hotels, airlines, and destinations. There are plenty of peer recommendations to choose from. Seventy-two percent of travelers post pictures during their travel experiences, and 76 percent post once they get home. Instagram is becoming the new daily travel guide.

12 Salesforce blog

13 Salesforce blog

14 Salesforce blog

feel that travel is an essential part of life

express interest in exploring a destination’s hidden gems

look for unique and dierent travel adventures

look for the “hottest/trendiest” spots

97% 76%

54% 32%

78% of millennials post about travels on social media

59% of travelers use TripAdvisor

reviews as research

54% use photos and videos

on social networks

And only

LHW CONDUCTED A SURVEY OF 1,500 LUXURY

TRAVELERS BETWEEN THE AGES OF 25 AND 64, AND

FOUND THAT AMONG THEIR CURIOUS TRAVELERS:

Source: Skift

10| Rocket Fuel Institute | Predictive Travel

All of these social media outlets have something in common, and something in common with the experiences that travelers crave—they are storytelling vehicles. And the key to creating exceptional experiences in travel is to co-create a story with the traveler as the protagonist, complete with an exciting beginning, a peak, and a satisfying end.

In addition, social media enables travel brands to add to that story by providing more information about customer identities than ever before. Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO of Expedia, pointed out in a 2016 podcast interview that the much broader network of data sources has revolutionized the way that Expedia can serve its customers. “We know that the vast majority of bookers don’t sign [into Expedia] so we don’t know you. Now that bookers are coming through

social networks where identity is established, [we] can start personalizing and optimizing to that identity. The players who do it best will be winners.”15

Rick Wise is CEO of brand consulting agency Lippincott, the agency best known for its overhaul of Southwest Airlines’ branding, which focuses heavily on customer experience from a flight’s start to finish. He told travel industry intelligence platform Skift that he looks to storytelling and behavioral science to unlock customer behavior. “When making decisions, we use our memories,” he says. “That has implications for designing the experience, in particular some of the themes around ending strong, building in surprise, and looking for opportunities to rewire and reinforce—what you say about your experience by putting it into a story arc that the customer can wrap their head around and imprint in their memory positively.”16

THE STORY IS IN THE DATATo influence and create those memories, you need to find the story in every traveler’s trip. That story lies in social media, in business intelligence, and in the customer intelligence available through analysis of transactional moments. Finding that story and piecing it together, being able to choose the right adventure and predict the right ending for the customer, is not about doing more. It’s about doing better. Travel brands need to be able to sift through the noise and bubble up the most pertinent experiences and information based on data.

In the case of travel more than any other industry, marketers must scale and become experts in user-generated content, tapping into social media and creating their own social media communities. Starwood has communities on Facebook and Instagram where travelers staying with them can post video, photos, and comments about their stays.17

15 “What online travel legends say about the future of travel,” Skift, October 12, 2016

16 “The Habits of Travel Bookers: The Psychology of Customer Experience,” Skift, 2016

17 Skift, 2016

feel that travel is an essential part of life

express interest in exploring a destination’s hidden gems

look for unique and dierent travel adventures

look for the “hottest/trendiest” spots

97% 76%

54% 32%

78% of millennials post about travels on social media

59% of travelers use TripAdvisor

reviews as research

54% use photos and videos

on social networks

And only

SOCIAL MEDIA

Source: Salesforce blog


When a technical glitch grounded 800 Southwest flights in October of 2015, the airline responded to every tweet and post about the inconvenience, which numbered in the “tens of thousands.”18 Despite the disastrous day, Southwest received praise for its efforts from travelers and the media. Rosewood Hotels and Resorts created #rwjourneys, a site dedicated entirely to user-generated travel photos and video, and partnered with TripAdvisor to share the content.19

Whether information comes from social media, from location awareness on devices, RFID-enabled badges and sensors, or internal systems, hotels, airlines, and destinations need to be able to identify valuable data and gather it to spot signals and opportunities to predictively meet needs and make memories, helping tell the customer story of their journey. Finding and leveraging that data hinges on having a predictive marketing platform and real-time information management system that can handle today’s proliferation of data points and sync with the myriad back-end management systems in travel—customer relationship management, revenue management, reservation systems, and more—to deliver the ultimate experience for the customer.

18 “How Southwest Airlines turned social media into social business,” Digiday, December 17, 2015

19 Rocket Fuel internal data

Two days before you are supposed to return

home from your trip, you receive an alert on your

phone that weather forecasters are predicting

a severe winter storm will move into your

hometown on your departure date. You bring up

your personal assistant and ask about options.

Your assistant informs you that the airline has

issued a weather waiver because of the storm,

and you are allowed to rebook your flight

yourself, at no charge. You ask your assistant

for options. The assistant comes back with two:

in Option A, you would rebook your flight for a

few days after your departure date and spend

extra time at the resort; with Option B, you could

fly to a neighboring town, rent a car, and drive

home. The assistant gives you the net cost of

each option. With your accumulated hotel points,

Option A is more affordable—and more enticing.

You decide to stay, and your assistant makes the

arrangements.

The entire process takes less than a minute.

CAPITALIZING ON DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION: DATA, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, AND PERSONALIZATION CREATE THE PREDICTIVE BUSINESS


How close are we to seeing this happen? Closer than you think. Airlines already offer weather waivers in the case of ominous forecasts, enabling customers to rebook flights and explore options with the airline app.20 Connecting the weather forecast with the real-time travel options and actions is already possible. Connecting that intelligent technology to other cognitive capabilities is no longer fiction—it’s an eventuality.

Several factors are converging to enable intelligent, dynamic decisions to be made in real time, with only the most necessary human intervention. One is the exponential explosion of data in the past two decades. With the widespread adoption of the web and mobile devices, we are seeing truly big data, an unprecedented volume and intersection of attributes—in the trillions— with which we can drive business growth and uncover insights and connections that previously remained in the dark.

THE AGE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCEHow do you harness, govern, and derive meaning from this explosion of data? “Machine learning is the automation of discovery—computers learning by themselves by generalizing from data instead of having to be programmed by us,” AI expert Pedro Domingos said in a 2015 interview.

20 “Airlines, Now More Proactive on Weather, Allow Fliers to Shift Own Travel Plans,” The New York Times, January 2, 2017

“It’s like the scientific method on steroids: formulate hypotheses, test them against the data, refine them—except computers can do it millions of times faster than humans.”

Machine learning and AI are already beginning to power the next generation of innovations, including autonomous cars, virtual personal shoppers, simulation sciences, fuel and microbe production, and medical diagnostics. Countless bits of data captured from digital interactions and web connectivity are flowing through modern technology platforms at a lightning-fast rate.

More data and more channels mean being able to predict and inform future outcomes. There are more digital and physical paths to purchase and more opportunities to provide exceptional customer service. However, data fragmentation in most industries, and definitely in travel, makes identifying and understanding these paths a huge challenge. Travel and hospitality companies must evaluate customer interaction at the level of the touch point or impression, understanding all there is to know about the moment in which a message can be made relevant and resonant for a customer. The age of programmatic media buying has created an environment that is rich with these types of stage-gate signals, which now enable understanding the intersection of physical and digital experiences. The state of data collection for decision making enhances experiences, because customer interaction today is a conversation. It’s no longer about preparing to respond. It’s about listening, asking, answering—it’s a two-way conversation that creates deeper connections between the brand and client.

In a sense, travel is the ideal proving ground for big data and artificial intelligence, just because so much data now exists. Through digital channels such as laptops and smartphones, travelers are connected to every step in not just the research and booking process of travel, but also the choices and activity involved in the trip itself—both while it is happening and post-trip with ratings and ruminations. Yellow Pages, paper maps, phoning ahead, and even physical room keys are going by the wayside as digital devices and sensors streamline every aspect of a trip. Starwood


Preferred Guest (SPG) members don’t even need to stop at the registration desk to check in or retrieve a room key. The SPG mobile app holds all of the information the guest—and the hotel—needs to navigate the stay. KLM Airlines communicates with passengers via Facebook Messenger in a two-way conversation, not just automated alerts. Apps, text messages, emails, websites, and social media communities prevail. Each step along the way during a trip offers multiple options. Customers get to choose their own adventure through the conversion, experience, and purchase journey, and that adventure unfolds across several devices.

These multiple devices and communication platforms generate an astronomical amount of data. From internal systems like travel manifests, communications logs, and reservations systems to consumer searches, app activity, and browsing, to the wealth of customer, destination, and brand information available via social channels, there is so much data that there’s no way the human mind can process and act on it all. What’s more, meeting and exceeding traveler expectations is no longer about using past behavior to indicate future performance. Customers in all industries, and especially travel, demand real-time responses to situations. In fact, merely responding in real time isn’t enough to go above and beyond standard customer service—brands need to use a combination of business intelligence and customer intelligence to respond dynamically and predictively in respective moments of opportunity.

THE POWER OF INFLUENCERSIn the travel industry, influencers have a huge impact on decision making and purchase. For example, women are the primary decision makers of travel plans. Not only do women account for nearly half of business travelers, but a 2013 Hyatt study confirmed that women make 80 percent of all travel decisions, including family trips, hotel choices, and business accommodations. By contrast, 72 percent of hotel bookings are made by men. This tells us that men may be the ones to complete the booking transaction, but they are merely carrying out the last step in the process—they were most likely not the decision makers. However, more than 70 percent of ad impressions are delivered to men, because they are the buyers. The consumers seeing the ads are not the ones making the decisions. Other members of the household—women—are the primary influencers. Are you reaching the right decision making audiences? The influencer, decision maker, and order executioner are all important to reach. Reaching both men and women in a household is way better than reaching only the men—studies prove it.21

With the help of an artificial intelligence marketing platform that looks at all devices and IDs in a household, brands can:

● Identify travel planning at the optimal moment of influence

● Connect influencers to bookers in the same household

● Weigh various marketing tactics with multi-touch attribution to most efficiently convert travelers

21 “Family Matters,” Rocket Fuel Institute, 2016

Increase in conversion probability when ads were shown to household influencers

Increase in conversion probability when ads were shown to multiple household users (buyers and influencers)

247% 1,993%

FAMILY MATTERS IN TRAVEL CAMPAIGNS

Source: Rocket Fuel Institute


By doing these things, brands can identify the real influencers in a household and target offers and ads to them, rather than directing these tactics toward the buyer only. With the right platform, it’s a strategy that pays off handsomely—campaigns in the travel and lodging industry saw a 247 percent increase in conversion probability when shown to household influencers, and a 1,993 percent increase in conversion probability when ads were shown to multiple users in the same household grouping—buyers, influencers, and other household members.22 fam matters

WHAT IS PREDICTIVE MARKETING?How does a programmatic marketing platform play a part in predictive travel? At the start of the millennium, we had digital advertising networks. These networks evolved into ad exchanges, in which display impressions could be funneled through a central inventory system. Demand-side platforms could connect and bid on each individual opportunity to show someone an ad prior to that person’s browser loading. Along with this evolution, an influx of data captured from programmatic campaigns ignited a series of shifts at the intersection of digital marketing, e-commerce, and customer experience, which created the opportunity for programmatic marketing. With programmatic technology, travel brands could capture audience intelligence through integrated moments.

We could already measure some transactional moments, for instance, a single interaction on a website. But transactional data available on travelers is becoming more sophisticated with new technology and new channels: social media networks with photos and video, apps and mobile wallet solutions, point-of-sale (POS) data reporting, RFID tags that can track a person over time, across locations, on a ski mountain or at a large resort, and OTAs that can match you with the right travel packages and most relevant flights and hotels according to your online travel profile.

The transition from programmatic marketing to predictive actions based on cognitive decision making comes with the maturity and convergence of disparate marketing solutions built to create optimal consumer experiences, drive ROI,

22 “Family Matters,” Rocket Fuel Institute, 2016

and capture data that reveals insights that are predictive of business and consumer outcomes. Programmatic technology has created a unique infrastructure that sets a new standard for predictive delivery of information, often referred to as real-time interaction management (RTIM), made possible with real-time evaluation of individual impression opportunities and the amount of data leveraged at the moment an automated decision can be made. For example, a personal assistant delivering four airline tickets, paid for with frequent flyer miles, would need to get data from the consumer’s personal profile, airline schedules, ticketing systems, loyalty program systems, and more, score and extract pertinent data in real time, and deliver insight to the consumer that would have taken several minutes or even hours to assemble manually. Instead, it’s done in moments, and the optimal decision is made for the consumer.

A true predictive platform needs to be able to:

● Integrate data across channels, silos, and systems

● Activate data through real-time decisions to the end consumer

● Provide intuitive insights that contribute to desired results such as sales conversions, purchase influence, and brand sentiment lift

● Respond and react to changing conditions to proactively solve customer needs

A real-time infrastructure comes to fruition when it can automate the next best action for a unique offer to a person, extend decisions to offline channels using appropriate data even through the use of static models (such as a call center or direct mail), and improve decisions across channels recursively.


FROM PERSONALIZATION TO MOMENT MAXIMIZATIONA common error that travel marketers commit is mistaking personalization for relevance and resonance. If a traveler misses a flight, he may receive a message: Dear Joe Graphic

That message has personal elements—the traveler’s name and destination—but it is not personal, and it doesn’t address the problem of the missed flight. Savvy travelers will not be impressed. What’s more, as happened with one carrier, the entire message may not reach its final destination:23 Dear x Graphic

No traveler wants to receive that message, the opposite of personalization. A superficial communication can be more damaging to a customer-brand relationship than a generic one, because it seems disingenuous, rather than merely disinterested.

Relevance and resonance arise when an airline or hotel knows what you need—sometimes before you know it yourself—and enables you to accomplish what you want

23 “Overcoming fake personalization in travel marketing,” Innovation Insights, February 24, 2015

to do at that moment—whether that is maximizing loyalty points, making a tight connection in a large airport, or finding that intimate, out-of-the-way restaurant for your anniversary dinner.

Geolocation in an airport or at a destination, the browsing history of a smartphone, an Instagram feed, or interaction

data from a Bluetooth beacon can help determine what message or action to provide for a customer—all without using any personal data about the individual holding a device. These efforts to create relevance and resonance may be virtually imperceptible to the customer. Yet it’s enough for a travel brand to create an experience that is more efficient, cost-effective, and satisfying—that resonates and creates a connection in an industry that is driven by customer emotion.

Imagine if that “personalized” message from the earlier paragraph also gave lists of alternative flights and links for one-touch rebooking, an offer to contact the traveler’s hotel and notify them of the change in arrival time, and the opportunity to book a complimentary car to the hotel through a ride-sharing service. The moment goes from forgettable to memorable with a little more context and connection. Artificial intelligence platforms that yield this type of dynamic intelligence could be on the path to making these meaningful interactions commonplace.

Messages Trans Airways Details

Today 10:17 AM

Dear Joe,Sorry you missed your flight to Philadelphia. Contact us to reschedule.

Message


Today 10:17 AM

We’re sorry, [traveler x] for the [problem y] on your flight to [destination z].23

Message


Today 10:17 AM

Dear Joe,Sorry you missed your flight to Philadelphia. Contact us to reschedule.

Message


Today 10:17 AM

We’re sorry, [traveler x] for the [problem y] on your flight to [destination z].23

Message


ARRIVING AT DYNAMIC INTELLIGENCEBrands across industries already engage in data-driven marketing—how does that become predictive customer intelligence? Twenty years ago, travel companies planned campaigns around static personas, with two primary objectives: book the trip and get the customer from Point A to Point B. It truly was about the destination, not the journey. With the wealth of data now available, hotels, airlines, OTAs, and other companies in the travel ecosystem can look at customers in a more dynamic way. There are opportunities and technologies that enable us to look at each customer as an individual, not as part of a segment. There is also the opportunity to continue serving a customer long after they land at an airport or check into a hotel—the travel journey goes on, and customer experience matters even more long after conversion—even after the trip is over. How does this dynamic intelligence come about?

Real-time contextual understanding and the ability to act immediately are what enable companies to meet customer needs in the moment and even anticipate those needs predictively. Today’s predictive marketing platform takes into account both consumer intelligence and business intelligence. The predictive marketing platform views consumer behavior on three levels:

● Household data—the aggregate activity that the user’s entire household—buyers and influencers alike—exhibits

● Device behavior—the cumulative usage data on a specific device tied to a household

● Session data, or the consumer ID—the individual, anonymous profile of consumer activity on a specific device (This ID is differentiated based on trends and any fluctuations that occur.)

The platform looks at these attributes in aggregate, taking into account all first-party consumer data as well as data from third-party sources, and incorporates business intelligence from the company’s raw data. These combined sources, comprising trillions of data points, analyzed in real time, yield the kind of dynamic intelligence companies can use to instantly and accurately decide how to act and meet a customer’s needs. It’s how an OTA can specifically target a package deal to the 20 prospects who meet the exact criteria for time, place, and type of travel at a certain price. Or how a hotel can know that you are scheduled to see a Broadway show but your dinner is running late, and send a car to get you there quicker.

With the breadth of technology available, it’s how Leading Hotels of the World can use an IBM Watson-enabled recommendation engine to power its Discovery Tool, which answers natural language, experience-based questions such as “What’s the best beach in the Caribbean?” or “Who has the best wine list?” with relevant hotel properties around the world.24 “We would ask, ‘Where do you want to go and for how many nights,’ versus ‘What type of experiences do you want to have?’” says Phil Koserowski, vice president of interactive marketing for LHW. “Through artificial intelligence, we can draw out some unique qualities and offerings that our 375 hotels offer, and highlight those relevant to specific customers.”

Companies used to have to wait days or weeks, even months to obtain the results of market research, surveys, focus groups, and other time-intensive endeavors. Today, travel brands have more than 200,000 impressions, page interactions, consumer posts, and shares—and that’s on their owned sites alone. They now have the power and the technology to observe and process those and millions more. Add to that the capabilities of machine learning to help find the signals, interpret the results, and make immediate, predictive decisions using data based on real, addressable people engaged with them in the moment.

24 “Leading Hotels of the World uses AI to drive destination discovery,” eMarketer, August 24, 2016


As marketing technologies become more mature in data retention practices, channel expansion, and attribute identification, true cognitive algorithms will start to take form, and data platforms will become decisioning platforms, talking to one another to determine the best course of action. However, the human element of marketing will always be critical, especially in the travel industry. Machines cannot replace the experience and emotion of human nature when experiencing destinations and personal moments. For travel, human curation and emotion will always need to be involved. Platforms and products are emerging that leverage both machine and human intelligence to create optimal travel experiences. Lola, an intelligent travel booking app, combines augmented chat, artificial intelligence, a staff of some of the world’s top travel agents, and a customer experience team to book travel for users. “We’re trying to create superhuman travel consultants who are AI-powered and can handle more trips per hour than a regular travel agent can,” says Paul English, founder of Lola and cofounder of Kayak.25 Still, the “human” part of “superhuman” is what curates the experiences and makes travel different than just your average product-based industry.

25 “Lola’s Booking Experiment Mixing Artificial Intelligence and Travel Agents is Live,” Skift, May 12, 2016

THE INTERNET OF THINGS GETS PERSONALIn the future, the intelligent, autonomous features of these OTAs and of hotels and airlines will manifest in the IoT, notably personal assistants and AI chatbots, similar to those we are seeing in the financial services industry (for example, Erica, Bank of America’s intelligent personal assistant, which debuted at the Money 20/20 conference in 201626). Chatbots are a natural progression in the travel agency, taking NLP a step further with natural language interaction (NLI) to both add a personal touch to interactions and improve service. Similar to our scenario, imagine if texting your rental car company with your arrival and departure information was all you needed to do to book your car—the assistant handles the rest. Or if changing your room required no more than texting a hotel bot?27

Chatbots and the IoT are already becoming commonplace in our world. In late 2016, Amazon had sold 3 million units of the Echo, its NLP-enabled, hands-free speaker. Google’s voice search is responsible for 20 percent of all mobile searches.28 We use Siri, Slackbot, Alexa, and other chatbots on a daily basis. Could we manually look up the information? Yes. But we don’t. According to Rajesh Kumar R of Mindtree, “Natural language interaction does not change the outcomes, nor does it drastically impact the speed with which instructions are executed. However, what it does is create unique experiences.”

Given the choice, we choose more hands-free, natural interactions. The implications for airlines, hotels, or car rental companies are immense. No more waiting on hold or interminable voicemail menus. According to Mindtree, “A bot with natural language capability can cater to millions of customers 24×7, backed by data and automation, with zero ramp-up time.” Not only can staff focus on more complex tasks and improve productivity, but through chatbots in the IoT can continue to collect data on customers that can be used to learn and further enhance service.

26 “Bank of America launches AI chatbot Erica—here’s what it does,” CNBC, October 24, 2016

27 “Natural Language Processing in Travel and Hospitality,” Mindtree, September 26, 2016

28 Mindtree paper


After a long day on the slopes, you pick up your

kids from ski school. They are exhausted. You

all are. You head back to your suite, where your

favorite cocktail is waiting for you, as well as hot

chocolate and warm cookies for the kids. As you

are relaxing in the lodge, you get a message on

your smartphone app. There are two massage

appointments available at the hotel spa in an

hour. If you decide to take them, the hotel will

provide a sitter for the kids, who will order them

pizza while the two of you have a quiet dinner

out. You jump on the massage appointments and

the sitter, but opt for pizza in the room with the

kids after your full day. You spend the evening

relaxing together and watching movies off your

Netflix account on the suite’s large flat-screen

television.

To achieve peak operational agility, businesses need systems that enable travel organizations to execute seamless data integration, granular audience insight, and real-time activation. From a user experience perspective, the right solution architecture creates a business intelligence platform that can help maximize customer moments based on resonance and relevance. On the back end,

this same solution architecture can also help sustain long-term innovation and steady, profitable growth. Travel companies must focus on converging two factors—the front end of user experience and the back end of data capture, integration, and activation—to further improve both business performance and customer engagement. They are symbiotic. Improve one, and you will improve the other.

Increased agility in delivery of travel services and experiences will need to occur across data architectures, delivery channels, analytics platforms, and more—each is equally important in realizing the predictive nature of interactions. The agility that we will see with the type of personalized digital assistant profiled in our scenarios will come by doing two things: breaking down barriers between data types and breaking down barriers between processes.

BREAKING DOWN BARRIERS BETWEEN DATA TYPES This is a critical step with travel, where the back end consists of multiple highly specific and siloed data types between airlines, hotels, rental agencies, OTAs, and more. Eventually, data will become more ubiquitous and standardized, allowing brands, partners, and vendors the ability to ingest and augment data based on persistent IDs to maximize accuracy and speed.

In travel, that data must come together between different types of travel disciplines, and the leaders of travel organizations know it. As Jay Walker, founder of Priceline and CEO of Upside, said in a recent podcast interview,

ACTING WITH AGILITY: BREAKING DOWN INFORMATION BARRIERS TO CREATE A SEAMLESS CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE


“In Amazon, the purchase path to buying binoculars is not different than buying a book. In travel, it is very different. There are hard-coded purchase paths that are significantly different. It will come down to fundamentally restructuring your databases and how your search technologies work, bringing them together… Once you’ve done that, building [a personal travel assistant] interface is pretty relatively simple, whether it’s voice, chat, or web.”29

While these legacy systems and data silos won’t be gone in months, or even a year or two, the right marketing or customer experience platform can interface with these systems to access their data and leverage it to enable better decisions both for the customer and for the business.

BREAKING DOWN BARRIERS BETWEEN PROCESSESWe’ve all joked about the airline ticket counter associate who needs 97 keystrokes to choose between a window and aisle seat assignment. But there’s truth behind the joke. Many travel programs and processes are as far from agile as you can get. Meeting customer needs in the future will require travel companies to be more agile in delivering information and services. From the time that the president of American Airlines met an IBM executive and Sabre was launched, the travel industry has understood the importance of connecting data with customers.30 But now that data is coming at a real-time rate, and brands need to be agile to keep up. A customer can communicate instantly with a smartphone or text message. To be predictive, an employee at a front desk, ticket counter, or rental car office must be able to not only act quickly, but also know the most appropriate action. Even Sabre, long the example of the cumbersome legacy system, is taking a giant leap toward agility with the Sabre Red Workspace, which provides integrated mobile services, sophisticated air pricing tools, and reporting and efficiency tools. Sabre’s

29 “What online travel legends say about the future of travel,” Skift, October 12, 2016

30 Sabre history

growing Hospitality Solutions group is launching new solutions to help both hoteliers and hotel customers more quickly connect with the right hotel experience for the right travelers.31

Predictive marketing platforms that can feed employees next best actions and relevant information about the person at the other side of the desk or end of the line will be the key to travel companies acting with agility. So will smartphone apps. Alice, a platform that connects guests with every department in a hotel, uses the smartphone as the universal form of communication between guests, staff, concierge, and API integration with existing vendors and systems. Staff no longer require radios or need to be at desks to receive messages from guests and coworkers. Concierges have restaurants and contacts at their fingertips at all times. Guests can communicate their needs whenever and wherever, in the way that works best for them—by app, text, or calling—and receive status updates on requests. Tools like Alice enable a two-way relationship between the guest and hotel, and enable the kind of instant service delivery that travelers now require. And on the back end, these tools have the reporting power to track service tickets and guest requests to keep improving performance.

ENABLING THE JOURNEYImproved agility in customer service and back-end processes never ends. The more nimbly an organization can meet needs and complete tasks, the more that organization will become agile over time, reaching new heights of efficiency, effectiveness, and economy. An intelligent predictive platform will continue to optimize to the best path and way of doing things, whether that’s by advising human employees or, in the near future, by interfacing with other intelligent platforms. Connie, Hilton’s robot concierge that runs on IBM Watson technology, acquires more and better answers as guests ask more questions. And with thousands of Hilton guests in their hotels each day, that learning will

31 Sabre history


happen exponentially.32 A predictive marketing platform could interact with technology such as Connie to improve back-end decision making and front-end delivery.

With predictive marketing technology, the customer path to purchase transforms. It becomes less about marching consumers through a funnel with a static outcome and more about meeting them where they are in the journey. Often, we are manically focused on a single event as the one indicator of engagement. In reality, there is no single path, but lots of wandering variation. Rather than there being a single conversion event, there are loads of signals, steps along the path, actions that indicate greater engagement of a customer and an increased likelihood that they will be interested in a particular travel offering. Companies will begin to maximize inventory and margins, for example, predicting with high accuracy how many people will take advantage of a certain offer at a certain time of year. This also maximizes value for channel partners in the ecosystem, such as a hotel and airline, as there are constant, conflicting incentives battles over users in any given day.

Companies have two big advantages in determining stage-gate signals. One is the full range of first-party data available to them through internal channels (travel manifests, website activity, reservation systems, and the like) and external channels (social media tags and mentions, browsing activity, and more). The other is partner data—hotels, airlines, car rental companies, ride-sharing and lodging apps, OTAs, and other players in the ecosystem forming natural partnerships where the exchange of data from universal IDs helps plot a customer’s path to purchase. Instead of forcing the expected path, brands and their partners can enable the customer’s ideal journey and, as they learn more, spot that path before the customer even sees it. When companies flex to follow the customer, they’re often rewarded for their efforts when customers skip traditional funnel steps and engage sooner.

32 “Meet Connie, Hilton’s smart robot concierge,” Computerworld, March 9, 2016

You’ve been back from your trip for a week, and

a package arrives at your house. Inside, there’s a

personalized photo album from the ski resort and

an online photo printing partner, containing the

photos that you uploaded to the resort’s photo

sites during your trip, plus a few professional

photos taken of your family on the mountain. In

addition, there’s a tin of the hotel’s homemade

chocolate chip cookies for the kids and a recipe.

You love the gifts, you had a great time, and

you’ll definitely be back.

The message is clear—customer data, predictive marketing technology, and artificial intelligence are making it increasingly possible for travel brands to tap into customer behavior and give customers amazing travel offers like never before. In the near future, with the help of AI and other cognitive technologies such as NLP, brands will be able to tap into customer mindset and emotions and deliver pre-travel, trip, and post-travel experiences in a predictive and effortless manner. The intelligent assistants of the future, while not here quite yet, are not difficult to imagine in the next five to ten years—and not just for travel, but for all verticals, including retail, banking, and healthcare.

Today, AI exists in intelligent marketing platforms that use machine learning to inform real-time decisions across paid and owned channels. Personal assistants today such as Siri and Alexa leverage the latest and greatest in deep learning, including NLP, to create solutions that can adapt based on intuitive human interaction. These two paths will eventually converge to incorporate master algorithms. The resulting assistant technology will move away from being purpose built for a single task (winning at chess, real-time bidding on ad impressions, booking travel) and move toward being

BECOMING A PREDICTIVE AND COGNITIVE BUSINESS


broad-based cloud solutions that can solve any problem under a unified platform. Your personal assistant won’t just be a travel app, but your right hand that pulls in all data and uses it to help you with all decisions in the course of your life. Travel is just one particular AI ingredient in that robust recipe.

It all starts with the data and the technology. Brands that take steps now, leveraging that data and acquiring the technology to do so, will be well positioned to thrive in that cognitive future. There are a few critical steps to getting there.

LEVERAGE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TO BECOME A SMARTER BRANDThere is virtually no way to imagine a future in the travel industry without AI. Companies who do not embrace AI-enabled technology will lag behind and even disappear. Predictive marketing platforms will not only enable humans to reach new heights in customer service, but these platforms will eventually enable humans to focus on complex strategic decisions as they speak to other systems and syndicate and automate more fundamental decisions.

AWARENESS CONSIDERATION PLANNING/INTENT

DECISION /EXPERIENCE

ADVOCACYMARKETINGSTAGE

DIGITALINTERACTIONS

THE MARKETER’SRESPONSIBILITIES

Monitor brand consumption product/service discrepencies, and consumer sentiment

Manage brand identity

Produce relevant content

Monitor brand consumption, product/service discrepencies, and consumer sentiment

Manage pre-sales experiences and interactions

Produce targeted campaigns

Monitor brand consumption, product/service discrepencies, and consumer sentiment

Manage pre-sales experiences and interactions

Produce refined lead database

Manage customer experience optimization

Produce feedback audiences

Manage customer experience optimization

Produce influencer audiences and loyalty programs

Integrate

Discover Activate

Social Social

Social

Social Data

Social Data

Email Email

Display

Display

Display

TV

Video

Message Receptivity

Native

Native

SearchWeb Behavior

Web Behavior

Web Behavior

Customer SupportCustomer Support

Probability

Site Experience

Consumer Intelligence Brand Affinity

Purchase History


AI will help companies find critical influencers in the purchase process and during the trip, bring vital data into context that was previously left in the dark, and improve agility so that brands serve travelers better and faster. The days of spray and pray marketing tactics are over—with AI, we enter into an era of unprecedented precision and speed in targeting and accuracy.

CONTEXT IS EVERYTHINGPeople take lots of trips. But just because you recognize that a consumer is shopping for a trip doesn’t mean you recognize what kind of trip it is. The fundamental shift in predictive marketing comes when companies can dig into the nuance that data provides to recognize the kind of trip and kind of traveler. For example, by sorting by length of trip, cost, and other factors, we can differentiate a business trip from a vacation—and understand that the same person may be shopping for both at different times.

The reality today is that people have multiple personalities and make decisions differently based on the context of the moment. Some do it based on affinity for a brand, others do it for the desire for experience, no matter what the brand. Younger generations are forgoing major purchases such as houses and cars for experiences, travel, and otherwise. What this means is that as marketers we can no longer make broad assumptions about who our best customer might be. The good news is that we have the ability to observe and collect data signals about customers and prospects (and the means to listen and respond, with the help of AI). With the ability to place data into context, we can find the right moment as well as the right person, and ultimately come to the right decision. Today, we can do it in an instant. Doing this well enables judicious use of ad dollars, as well as extremely high uptake on offers. Brands that adopt an agile, predictive methodology can also save on overhead, allowing for better offers and customer discounts. And gone are the days of static discounts—we can enter the era of real-time bidding for consumer purchases by presenting a unique offer to each unique individual.

CONNECT WITH PARTNERSTrips are a holistic experience for the traveler—not just flight, hotel, and car, but beyond that, dining, attractions, retail, and researching or documenting it all on social media. No one travel company, whether it’s a hotel, airline, or other, can have that 360-degree view on its own. To best leverage data and offer experiences, brands must fully embrace strategic partnerships. When these brands are connected throughout a traveler’s experience, they can work together to create exceptional service and streamline processes on both the front and back ends. For example, leveraging photos taken during a trip to create a personalized album. Or checking bags from a hotel to streamline air travel. Or being able to book flight, hotel, and rental car, and make restaurant reservations from a single sign-on—or with a personal assistant.

Amazon, Google, Apple, and Microsoft are all developing APIs for their personal assistant technologies, which travel apps can incorporate for intelligent capabilities. In addition, both Expedia and Kayak have incorporated skills into Amazon Alexa that enable travelers to check hotel and flight prices, book car rentals, or inquire about loyalty programs. Currently, companies are able to do these basic partner integrations. Eventually, the AI from travel companies will be able to talk to AI from other systems, where data is flowing to and from partners and enabling companies to delight customers in unique and meaningful ways. The path to one overarching assistant may be one of several stages. For example, if a travel assistant can’t answer a question, it will refer you to another assistant with another AI that can. Eventually those AIs may live under one umbrella. But it all starts with breaking down barriers between partner data and systems.

Building an audience hub through which data can flow into a single repository—from hotels and airlines, through unique user devices, and enterprise systems—is the key to creating optimal connected experiences. This consists of a marketing technology stack that can curate data from fragmented sources, activate that data in real time, and dynamically evaluate impression opportunities while improving the organization of data sets over time. The more data that can be captured, the more patterns can be recognized by cognitive systems that can learn in a perpetual manner. These insights can be made actionable—driving results and creating deeper and resonant brand connections for emerging loyalists.


The path to connecting customer journeys is evolutionary. Travel brands have made great strides with their investments in omnichannel capabilities, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things. But there’s still a long way to go. For travel and hospitality companies of the future to deliver relevance and resonance and to build a dynamic infrastructure and processes—in essence, for them to survive—they must embrace these cognitive technologies.

By being predictive with AI, agile with streamlined processes and lines of communication, and connected with strategic partners inside and outside the travel industry, travel brands will be able to take off into an exciting future. Then they will see how the customer experience spans across travel phases and disciplines. And only then will brands have the

situational awareness to be able to provide exceptional customer experiences that are efficient, contextual, relevant to immediate needs, and effortless for the participant. Implementing dynamic processes across the travel journey through agile frameworks will drive critical differentiation as companies become empowered to offer the relevant and resonant experiences that travelers demand today. Having AI, agility, and connection in place will set the stage for a more dynamic future, where personal assistants exist to streamline work and deliver exciting experiences along the travel journey.

TAKING OFF INTO A MORE DYNAMIC FUTURE

FIVE STRATEGIC IMPERATIVES FOR PREDICTIVE TRAVEL


PEOPLE NOT DEVICESPredictive organizations are customer-centric, not product- or device-centric. All transactions and devices tie back to a universal ID of a single person or household.

MOMENTS NOT SEGMENTS Traditional marketing segments are rooted in historical data. Predictive businesses build models that include transactional moments for real-time accuracy and the power to anticipate and exceed customer expectations.

OWNED NOT RENTEDFirst-party data is a predictive organization’s biggest asset. The best decisions and innovations come when truly leveraging this proprietary data.

JOURNEY NOT FUNNELPredictive businesses know that a sale or conversion isn’t the final transaction. The customer’s journey never ends, and the path to conversion is often nonlinear. Businesses that can anticipate future actions are the ones that will succeed.

DECISIONS NOT DATAFor the past decade, data management platforms have been hubs for data centralization, normalization, syndication, and analysis. Today, data management platforms must evolve into decision management platforms, exchanging models, with syndicated intelligence replacing syndicated data. In other words, one system’s AI talking to another system’s AI.


ABOUT ROCKET FUEL INSTITUTE

The Rocket Fuel Institute is a research initiative dedicated to the transformative

field of artificial intelligence in digital marketing. The RFI aims to transform

the digital industry, propelling it to the forefront of the global shift to artificial

intelligence (“AI”) by exploring innovation at the intersection of data, technology,

and customer experiences. We seek ways to enable and sustain AI-based growth

in marketing and across verticals by understanding how digital transformation and

adaptive automation combined with human intuition accelerates over time. Our

long term research goal is to converge academic research with applied sciences in

machine intelligence to understand the nature of brand experiences. For inquiries

into our existing or forthcoming work, or to discuss how you might partner with us,

please reach out to:

Alex Perrin

Director, Innovation

[email protected]

www.rocketfuel.com

ABOUT THE PREDICTIVE VERTICAL SERIES

The Predictive Vertical series explores the way marketers in respective industry

categories can gain a significant competitive advantage with best of breed

solutions. The series covers in-depth macro trends that are shaping the global

economy, defining the fate of companies and careers, while providing a sweeping

perspective on the most advanced tools that are changing the way brands interact

with audiences, and the way businesses achieve actionable insights to make more

informed decisions in finance, CPG, retail, healthcare, and travel.

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