Tourico’s burgeoning data mining initiative is helping Chinese intermediaries in improving upon their product offering by evaluating travel booking behavior, a detailed look at how business intelligence is paving way for competitive edge in the B2B domain.
The B2B specialist’s Travel Global Systems is minutely scrutinizing the requests that are hitting its platform through a dedicated data mining initiative. This way Tourico is adding a new dimension to its high-volume, wholesale model. The company, which now has a team of computer scientists dedicated to identifying the origin and cause of shifts in travel booking behavior, asserts that this is a novel way of assessing the performance in the wholesale sector of travel.
Clearly, the team is looking beyond the routine proposition – technology connection, content, and rates. The team has been working on its business intelligence software to evaluate future demand for different travel destinations over the past few years. Such predictive analytics revolves around volumes of travel search and booking data.
Today the efficiency that Tourico’s data mining team (comprising 10 data scientists) is targeting has two facets – enhancing pricing and contracting capabilities of the team (negotiations, relevant content depending upon the search for a particular destination etc.), and for the ones who source inventory, providing a constructive feedback and recommendations to let them improve the overall user experience and conversion rate of their respective platforms.
From an organization’s perspective, the objective is to pre-emptively react to future spikes in demand. This also complements the business model of Tourico, as being a global distributor it buys its inventory in bulk, typically years in advance.
As for helping OTAs with negotiated rates of Tourico, consider an example. Say there are two OTAs, one from China and one foreign OTA, both targeting same destination for the outbound business. Let’s say the foreign OTA at any given point of time is making better use of the inventory from Tourico, and the Chinese OTA isn’t displaying the best of the properties that are available.
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