Cutting through the noise

The Tipping Point for Travel Retail: How to stand out from the crowd.

Part 1: It is so much better, when it is personal! How to nail personalization.

In our connected world, consumers are expecting a personalized experience when they interact with brands. It is a given. Leisure travel is the type of activity that naturally triggers a lot of emotion and excitement, generating all sorts of needs and wants. For brands operating in travel retail and destination activities, this means enormous potential.

The appetite from travelers for branded offers in fashion, beauty, accessories, and destination activities, just before and during their trip, is strong. In fact it is € 280 billion a year strong. We also know that 79% of travelers want to be offered personalized and contextually relevant third party offers through their trusted travel supplier, after they booked their trip.

But (here comes the “but”), in a market spending € 48 billion to reach and engage with travelers to get a piece of their € 280 billion travel retail and destination activities spending, the question is HOW to nail personalization (beyond “Dear John” or “Dear Jane”), and HOW to stand out from the crowd?

The answer: create meaningful interactions with travelers, and think like a concierge.

Create meaningful interactions.

It all comes down to two things: context and timing. Here is the trick: replace your irrelevant, impersonal and context lacking campaigns and messaging, by personal, context aware, and timely interactions making them meaningful to travelers. This will happen if you can leverage the tens of powerful sources of information that are available. You might ask: “how can I find or access these tens of powerful sources of information?.” Also, you want to make sure you are not intrusive here, or worse that you constantly track people (looking at you “big tech”). I will share some insights on these topics in my next articles.

Think like a concierge.

Let us go back to the basics: what do we as consumers associate with concierge service? Convenience, understanding of our needs, and the individualized touch, right? Back to understanding the context and the timing: who is it, that you are engaging with? Is it a solo traveler? Or is it a family with children? Or something else? Based on that, what do they need or want? And equally, when do they need or want it? A concierge does not only think about travelers needs and wants, but also combines that knowledge with relevant information at hand, increasing traveler’s trust and engagement. A concierge would know that travelers do not need beachwear when they are leaving their beach resort. On the other hand, exposing them to a personalized, contextual, and timely offer will make an enormous difference.

Creating meaningful and concierge style interactions, will bring your campaigns to the next level and ensure that you stand out from the crowd.

Getting personalization right is a science, with a (tiny) sprinkle of fine art.

Travel retail brands and destination activities companies who crack this code, or who work with an ecosystem cracking this code, have a bright future ahead of them.

Written by Bojan Jokic, CEO & Co-Founder, Epteca

Hotels are losing out on the $280 billion ancillary opportunity

Hoteliers widely agree on the importance of ancillary revenue; how to implement is less clear. Often stand-alone loyalty based platforms are used, rather than learning best practice from the airline industry which has refined ancillary optimization over a decade.

Learnings from airlines, the early adaptors of ancillary offerings, can benefit hotels

While filling passengers into the airplanes is important, 42% of airlines’ total profit is actually driven by ancillary product and service sales; becoming drivers to industry profitability. In 2018, ancillary revenue represented $92 billion for the airline industry and has become the fastest growing revenue component. While the actual booking phase is a crucial cross-selling point, the post-booking phase up to boarding and on-flight time are where the more advanced systems are gaining impressive results.

Big data ensures success

The hotel industry is still in its early stages, often leaning towards the traditional stand-alone loyalty solutions known in their industry to capture ancillary sales. However, learnings from the success of airlines and OTA’s suggest another strategic direction; the power of mass data in shared solutions. Think Google and why building a new stand-alone search engine might not be the best choice. Data processing 120+ million travelers makes Epteca a more powerful, more precise and more data driven predictive understanding of guest context and therefore better at combining ancillary offers to the needs of each guest. That is the secret behind its unmatched engagement and conversion rates in the industry. The extreme volume of transactions allows the artificial intelligence to learn faster so the predictive algorithms are refined and applied in real-time.

Higher share of guest wallet. Guaranteed!

To capture a bigger share of guest wallet, both in- and off-property offerings and experiences should be targeted to each guests’ specific context. Better capacity usage, up-sell and F&B cross-selling are low hanging fruits. The crucial new revenue opportunities to add stems from curated e-shopping, referral fees, specific media selling, strategic partnerships which all can be materialized with the right ancillary technology platform and marketplace.

Filling hotel rooms with guests is important, increasing total guest value is equally fundamental in order to manage a healthy hotel. Guests spend much outside the hotel; money a hotel could get a share of. By creating a hyper-personalized closed-loop communication based on big data, each guest is met with engaging and relevant information and carefully curated offers from brands and services which together increases the overall guest experience as well drives new revenue streams. Higher share of guest wallet is essential for every hotel in this competitive market, and Epteca is the only end-to-end, plug & play solution in the world based on big data and AI with best-in-class conversion rates. Guaranteed!

About Epteca:

The ancillary technology solution from Swiss based Epteca has become one of the favorite partners; data processing 120+ million travelers combined with a proprietary AI empowered closed-loop marketing platform, Epteca has boosted ancillary revenue unmatched in the travel market.

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