As travelers, we’re spending more and more of our journey in the digital realm. And, as a result, our precious first-party data has become pure gold for travel brands. They’re using this valuable currency to boost their traffic and their revenues.
How do Travel Brands get their hands on this data?
Travel brands are collecting all the tidbits we willingly share on brand websites, social media channels, mobile apps, and anywhere else we let our travel dreams run wild. By giving us useful tools that help in our trip planning they are giving us a way to provide them with first-party data on us. Then they are able to piece together our digital footprints to get a clear picture of who we are and how they can better connect with us.
And is that a bad thing? …Not necessarily, if it means we get recommendations that are more targeted to our interests.
How can Destinations use this information?
Destinations can do exactly the same thing that the larger travel brands are doing. By providing site visitors with a compelling reason to stay on their website … something that is ‘sticky’ and encourages visitors to share their interests and their trip plans … Destinations can have also access to valuable first-party data.
What are some examples of sticky website experiences for Destinations?
Anything that requires site visitors to create an account, like:
- Trip planning
- Trip Booking
- Joining a community
provide sticky experiences for consumers, prompting them for information that will allow the Destination to personalize the visitor experience.
What can Destinations do with first-party data?
With first-party data – data that is gathered from website visits and app usage – Destinations can be more instructive in their marketing to consumers. And when consumers say to them, ‘I am planning a trip, what do you suggest?’ they can actually give a pretty good answer. Personalization is a high priority for today’s savvy consumer – it is important to stay on top of this trend.
Data analysis
Now here is where the rubber meets the road – what would happen if Destinations could combine data from different sources in order to paint a bigger picture?
What if a Destination could see their Google Analytics, trips planned, trips taken and the actual visitor data from other sources?
That would create an incredibly clear picture of the impact of a Destination’s marketing efforts and allow them to create more accurate, reliable reports as well as plan better for future marketing efforts.
There are currently a number of business intelligence tools available that help Destinations to gather all of their data in one place …
- Rove
- Mabrian
- Simpleview
These tools don’t, however, provide Destinations with a way to extend the first-party data that is available.
At trippl, we are building a tool that will allow Destinations to pull all of their existing marketing and web analytics data into one dashboard – along with first-party data from trippl users – and combine it together in a way that will enable them to draw a correlation between their web visits and their actual visits.
If you have thoughts on this then we want to hear them … please reach out to discuss!
