Forward-looking distribution methods are associated with greater personalization characteristics, resulting in improved opportunities for an airline to offer the right product at the right price to the right customer at the right time.
To get closer to their customers, travel suppliers including airlines, hotels, cruise lines and rental-car companies need to understand customer preferences and purchase behaviors to better serve customers across all channels of distribution. Demanding customers who have high expectations for personalized services are a reality in today’s extremely competitive airline marketplace.
Successful customer experiences are fundamental drivers for airline revenue growth, and those experiences represent heavy influences on product investments from suppliers, intermediaries and software vendors to help ensure customer loyalty.
Travel suppliers are also investing in advanced analytics to understand customer traits, behaviors and preferences to support customer acquisition, maximize revenue-generation potential from the customer base and retain the most profitable customers.
To enable customers with targeted options, next-generation applications collect information from customers in real-time. Analytics have advanced from descriptive analytics to predictive analytics (in other words, what will happen) to prescriptive analytics (recommending options).
Targeted content
A common theme across the travel value chain is to display targeted content to a given customer based on implicit or explicit information that is known about the customer. This type of deep understanding can be derived from alternate data sources such as transactional booking and ticketing data, demographic data, social media, survey data and other sources to segment and target customers with relevant offers.
Segmentation of customers based on purchase-behavior patterns is never perfect and should be refined on a periodic basis as there are new data sources and as customer behaviors change over time.
In the competitive marketplace, travel solutions should focus on products that resonate with customers to improve conversion rates and maximize revenues for suppliers with every interaction by offering the ideal product or bundle to a customer at the right price when he or she is ready to make a purchase based on customer-behavior data.