With data breaches increasingly in the news and customers less trusting than ever, is the travel industry’s ‘new gold’ too much like hard work?
Just about every company in the travel space is swimming in a sea of customer data. Navigating through this is an even more delicate challenge than it once was – customers want useful and personalised experiences, but they don’t want to feel companies are creepy in how much they collect and know.
This was an essential question on day one of EyeforTravel San Francisco, its digital summit taking place this week. Here, leaders from major travel brands offered and sought guidance for how to better understand and use their data to create personalised and valuable experiences. But with Facebook’s controversy and other daily concerns in the news surrounding data privacy, there were no easy answers.
Listening to feedback
Michelle Gilman Jasen, the regional director of sales and marketing for Accor Hotels, said balancing privacy and personalisation is an issue that gets a lot of attention. Tackling it means doing as much listening to humans as diving into what the data says.
“How do you draw those lines? Frankly right now it is with a lot of customer feedback,” she said. “We sit through a lot of customer advisory sessions and ask how much do you want us to take that into consideration? We don’t want to let you down, but we also don’t like to overstep.”
For example, she said that travel brands need to understand that consumers are, “no longer bucket-able”. While it’s often useful to create profiles and spot general trends, data needs to be used to make the type of product offerings hit the right note. Customers want to feel there is a worthy payoff in how their data is used.
