Over the past few years, Big Data has transformed the way the travel and tourism sector functions. Usage of data has always been an asset in the travel industry, and it was one of the first to embrace it for business advantage. Airlines pioneered the use of price optimization analytics, and hotels adopted the same tools with great success.
The Travel and Tourism sector is a nonstop data generator, creating millions of records every day. It generates large, complex and unstructured datasets ranging from online transaction records to customer preferences. Exploiting the power of big data can provide insights that help deliver a more efficient travel experience, an integrated view of customer behaviour that has never been possible before, with benefits to both travel companies and travellers alike. This provides immense opportunities to dramatically enhance current industry processes to become more responsive and focused around traveller needs and preferences, improve products and services, push innovation and build better relationships with customers.
Here are the most important ways in which big data is impacting the travel industry, and how your organization can take advantage of the changes:
- Personalized customer experience
- Competitive differentiation
- Targeted marketing
- Revenue generation through Cross-sell and Up-sell
- Insight into what customers want—now and in the future
In the travel industry, big data is being leveraged to provide customers with exceptional personalized experiences. Designing travel products and services that deliver and even anticipate exactly what a traveler needs requires a deep understanding customers’ preferences and behaviors.
Big data and data analytics are enabling companies in the travel industry to understand customers’ preferences and provide them best travelling experience accordingly. British Airways as an example of a travel company that is achieving competitive advantage through Big Data–driven customer insight. BA had put customer Big Data, drawn in part from its Executive Club loyalty program and website, to work in its Know Me program. The goal is to understand customers better than any competing airline and to put the customer knowledge accumulated across tens of millions of touch points (which spanned several years) to work for each individual customer’s benefit.
Big data has forever changed the travel and tourism industry. Big data has made it possible for companies to get insights and act on detailed customer information without hiring more employees or going through books of research.
