With the advancement of digital technology, travelers are now leaving their digital footprint at multiple touch points, right from researching about possible destination for next vacation, to searching and making a booking, going for the trip and sharing feedback about the travel and stay.
Cloud Technology today allows package providers to capture and store new age data like Social Reputation, Search, Events, Weather, Airline Capacity, News, Promotion, Booking, etc. at real-time basis.
Big Data Technology for travel package providers allows them to analyze this new age data and generate actionable insights like competition price change, demand forecast, price recommendation, etc. to take automated decisions like price change, promotion, offer, etc. at a real time basis.
The challenge for package providers is to architect and implement the end to end ecosystem for leveraging the maximum benefit of the new age data and also to drive a culture of data driven decision making.
How to find the Right Data and use it effectively?
Travel related Data volume is growing exponentially and it is getting obsolete at a much faster rate than before with the advent of live streaming data. So it’s critical for package providers to set the right data strategy by leveraging cloud & machine learning technology for being able to capture, store, analyze, generate insights and make necessary changes at scale and in real-time.
How to find Micro Trends and use it effectively?
Package providers need to capture and store the data at multiple levels of granularity of geography, time window, customer level, etc. In terms of geography it could be at a country, city, district, street and at an individual property level. Similarly, in terms of time window, it could be hourly, daily, weekly, monthly or yearly. This will help in finding localized micro trends at various levels which can then be used to run personalized campaigns.
For example, most of Europe is experiencing very hot summer in 2018, which is impacting the overall demand for summer vacation to destinations especially in southern Europe. If a travel package provider captures and analyzes historical weather, events, holidays, market pricing and booking patterns at a destination level, it will be able to predict easily the impact of weather on its business. Now if the package provider tracks the weather forecast, it can easily forecast future demand and for periods of soft demand it can proactively take measures like running promotion, focusing on high demand market, etc.
