How to Use Travel Insights to Increase Visitors and Improve ROI

With border restrictions lifted in most countries, the travel industry can finally look forward to a boom in both domestic and international travel. But is the industry ready? Consumer behavior has changed dramatically due to the pandemic and this also extends to visitor behavior. To stay ahead of emerging trends, and increase visitors and ROI, airlines, hospitality partners, tourism agencies and destinations will need real-time, accurate, and actionable travel insights. These insights can provide valuable information on traveler behavior and preference, which can be used to inform marketing strategies and improve the travel experience.

Benefits of Travel Insights

Travel insights can enable airlines, hospitality providers, and tourism boards to stay ahead of the game and gain a deeper understanding of what consumers want and how they behave. Travel insights powered by consumer behavior data and location intelligence can enable this understanding by analyzing data on everything from visitor origins, and footfall data to top points of interest. 

Here are 5 benefits of using travel insights:

1. Understanding customer behavior and preferences

Travel insights and tourism data analytics can help tourism agencies and destinations understand customer behavior and preferences. By analyzing data on visitor origins, brand preferences, points of interest, and more, organizations can gain insights into customer behavior, preferences, and trends. This can help organizations develop more effective marketing strategies and improve their products and services to better meet customer needs.

For example, insights from tourism data can help airlines, hospitality providers and tourism boards understand where travelers are coming from, which destinations are most popular among their target audience, which activities are most popular, and what tourist movement patterns are like. Location intelligence can also help organizations identify the most popular time of day or day of the week for visitors at popular tourist spots. This can help organizations focus their marketing efforts on the most effective channels, develop new products and services that meet customer needs, and improve the overall customer experience.

2. Improving customer service

Travel insights can also help airlines, hospitality providers, and tourism boards improve customer service. By analyzing emerging trends and preferences, organizations can identify areas for improvement and implement strategies to address them. For example, understanding movement patterns can help hotels or attractions identify potential choke points or offer customized suggestions on when to visit popular spots based on visitor traffic at a particular time of day or day of the week. 

3. Optimizing marketing strategies

Visitor analytics can help airlines, hospitality providers and tourism boards optimize their marketing strategies. By analyzing customer behavior, organizations can understand the visitor profile and identify the most effective marketing channels based on the visitor profile and adjust their strategies accordingly. They can also ensure accuracy in their advertising campaign with accurate audience curation and targeting based on the visitor profile and interests.

4. Attract more travelers and measure ROI

Destinations can use the data to identify their desired target audiences and meet them where they are. Attract more visitors with targeted advertisements on mobile, CTV, out-of-home billboards, or other digital channels. Inform your digital campaigns with insights on where past visitors went or retarget past visitors or retarget audiences who have interacted with advertisements on mobile or billboards. You can also use a data intelligence platform to measure ROI by attributing visits to the target destination to your campaigns.

5. Study visitor patterns at destinations

Apart from analyzing data on travelers and visitors, you can also use travel insights powered by location intelligence to find out past visitors’ top points of interest, including tourist attractions, shopping centers, and restaurants or cafes. Use this data to analyze patterns in movement, popular visiting times, and how the top destinations change over time. These insights can be used to offer better tours and packages or inform future partnerships/routes. 

Other Use Cases

The use cases of these data insights could potentially be limitless. Organizations can use the data to answer crucial questions that can inform marketing as well as operation strategy. Here are a few more questions that Azira’s solution for tourism has helped our clients answer:

• How far are my customers willing to travel to get to an airport or hotel?
• What are travelers prioritizing: airport location, flight schedule, or price?
• What are the up-and-coming destinations or points of interest in a particular location?
• What are the seasonal trends for certain destinations?
• What are the differences in the preferences of business vs leisure travelers?

There are many more possible use cases and questions you can answer using insights from travel data.

So how do organizations obtain travel insights and what steps do they need to follow?

For accurate and actionable insights, organizations will need access to the latest data on their target audiences and visitor profiles. The first step would be to ensure that your in-house first-party data is updated, cleaned and accurate. But in-house first-party data could be a limited source of information and may not complete information on your consumer’s profile. Customer data enrichment can ensure you are not missing out on critical pieces of the puzzles. This can help you not only understand your existing customers better but also identify similar profiles leading to audience expansion.

To analyze this data, organizations will also need to have a solid understanding of how to analyze and interpret this data. This requires expertise in data analytics, as well as a deep understanding of the travel industry and consumer behavior. 

The alternative is to use a data intelligence platform that can help organizations visualize visitor movement patterns, identify where visitors are coming from, where they go in a particular neighborhood or street, and more. For example, Azira’s data intelligence platform provides organizations with operational intelligence about places and marketing intelligence about people. 

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