Vacation is the time to unwind. But with the stress of planning and research, many travelers find themselves frustrated before they even depart. The hospitality industry has caught on, and leaders within the space are attempting to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to create superior customer experiences.
Website ease-of-use and personalization go hand-in-hand, making AI and its data-driven insights a valuable tool for marketers. Presenting travelers with a tailored experience and relevant suggestions takes some of the guesswork out of planning and speeds up decision-making. In the end, faster, easier online experiences benefit both the traveler and the organization.
Making Travel Personal
The travel industry is visually-driven. Aspirational destination photography inspires travelers to open their wallets to experience what the photos promise.
Armed with this knowledge, travel and hospitality companies amass great stores of images and assets. In the hands of the right customer, these images can inspire a purchase. But without an efficient way to index and present these photos to customers, their full potential remains untapped.
To drive better customer experiences — and turn higher profits — hospitality companies are using AI technology to understand their images and assets.
Rather than team members manually sorting through and selecting the perfect image among thousands, AI technology uses machine learning to scan and label photos with the relevant keywords. With well-tagged images, AI then uses the metadata to exponentially improve user personalization.
Increased user personalization relies on customer demographics. When a customer arrives on the website or digital channel, the traits of that user — gender, age, location or anything else known about the user — are connected to images tagged with the keywords that are relevant to those traits.
This mirrors similar customer experiences that travelers are already familiar with, such as the “Because you watched” feature on Netflix. The visitor is connected to relevant imagery and assets in real-time and provided with quality suggestions to encourage a purchase.
But tailored experiences extend beyond offering suggested photos and assets. Travel companies are also taking advantage of AI to match site visitors to relevant offers. We have seen attempts in AI to use psychographics to build a visitor profile, based on demographics and personal preferences. Then, the technology sweeps its database of corresponding offers that are tagged with that psychographics and presents more precise offers to the visitor.
Some companies are even beginning to venture into AI content creation, assembling full pages of content for a particular customer segment. However, this technology still comes with a long list of challenges yet to be solved, especially around achieving true relevance.
The Trouble With AI
Personalized, AI-backed digital experiences are an incredible advantage for marketers. But matching visitors to the right content can be difficult. And as an emerging technology, AI does sometimes get it wrong. The mismatches between content and user are generally basic in nature — for example, assigning irrelevant photos or offers to visitors.
However, it’s important to keep in mind that every image or asset that fails to inspire a visitor risks instead frustrating them. And a subpar online experience can be the difference between booking a trip and abandoning it in the cart.
Maintaining the correct level of user relevance is critical and requires a focus on collaboration between the marketing team and the technology itself. Contrary to popular myths and headlines, AI rarely works without humans.
In order to produce accurate and relevant results, the technology must be informed by human decision making. The right CMS or content marketing platform will empower the marketing team with a centralized content platform to update and review assets — because outdated or incorrect assets offer no benefit, with or without the power of AI.
Because AI cannot run on its own, marketers must put into place processes where the technology informs them with data. Then, marketers can decide the next course of action based on that data — grouping users or assets into relevant categories.
While AI is incredibly useful in segmenting and surfacing information, it’s the human reasoning that takes this data and creates a meaningful and actionable message.
Travel is Smarter With AI
AI technology in travel doesn’t stop with personalized digital experiences. Some travel companies are going beyond the web to incorporate personalization into real-life guest experiences. Carnival cruises are using the Internet of Things (IoT) and AI to turn their cruises into “smart cities at sea.”
The allure of increased personalization and machine learning has a strong pull on marketers, especially those in travel, an industry in the midst of its digital revolution. But with any new technology, advancements that directly impact the customer must be done with careful planning and strategy. Then, when implemented correctly, the technology can do its part, reducing costs and increasing conversions.
About the Author: Rasmus Skjoldan is the Chief Marketing Officer at Magnolia CMS, working out of Copenhagen and Basel. Rasmus works to lead global marketing, product management, analyst relations, and UX. He brings a wealth of experience in the area of content hubs and omnichannel content management to the table. A former brand manager of TYPO3, Rasmus was user experience lead of the TYPO3 Neos open source project before running Cope, a Copenhagen-based content strategy consultancy.