How Big Data Transforms Travel: Enhancing Customer Experience Through Real‑Time Personalization

It’s your first visit to a city and you have no one to guide you, imagine the tragedies that might befall: the hotel you check-in has worst facilities, you don’t have enough information to go around the city. In short, your whole trip gets ruined and the reason being lack of real-time information. But with big data entering into the picture, online services have come to rescue.

The biggest opportunity for the application of big data in travel industry is in the extensive personalization of offerings to match customers individual needs. Travelers always want unique destination matching their preferences, comfort of home and now travel companies can provide it with the help of insights gained from big data. Some companies are even gathering the data of browsing movements of customers on the website in real time to better understand their needs and cater to them.

CURRENT STATE

Current state of Big Data in the travel industry:

• Now it has evolved from just profiling to personalization. Eg. Recommending specific hotel based on wants and previous purchase patterns.
• Google has developed a high speed restricted version of web for premium services.
• Processing of data via cloud has been recent development. Travel is complex and increased bandwidth is necessary to support

Few attributes which make big data important:

• Millennials visit 10.4 sources of online information before buying.
• 75% have social media profile
• 83% sleep with mobile by bed-side
• 57% update their social media while traveling

(Source: Tnooz & American express Insights)

USAGE AND POSSIBILITIES in TRAVEL INDUSTRY

• Revenue Management: Travel industry can offer optimized pricing for perishable commodities such as seats and hotel rooms.
• Increase in personalization: This can be done based on consumer’s behaviour, social media relationship, location, etc.
• Travel Management: Big data can be used to profile a traveller and henceforth provide them with itinerary management and other related services.
• New Revenue Models: Big Data can help in exploring new revenue models according to your current performance and can impact the margins.

BENEFITS

• Better decision support: Big data not on speeds up decisions and data processing but also helps to make more customer focused decisions.

• New products and services for customers:  With the use of big data the wants and needs of people have clearly in focus so new products and services can be developed to serve them better.

• Big data also helps in better engaging with customers and developing long-term relations.

With services such as travel increasingly getting personalized and customers creating more data than ever, it makes perfect sense for companies to leverage technologies like big data and analytics to boost performance, customer experience and profits.

However, it’s not just enough to collect and process piles of data. The real value lies in making sense from the data and turning it into actionable insights and then implementing it with a strategy. Big data is set to change the face of Travel in future.