Great come together with industry leaders in the travel industry to discuss martech solutions

Recently, executives from Insider’s Singapore office attended Digital Travel APAC where over 400 top hoteliers, airlines and OTAs gathered to address their most pressing digital challenges and network with key market participants. It was great to come together with industry leaders to discuss innovative CX and martech solutions and how to address some of the most pressing challenges in the travel industry.

While everyone feels the pressure that OTAs put on the industry, including competing OTAs, it still is particularly tough for hotel chains. The trend clearly goes towards the creation of defensible loyalty programs and initiatives that allow the travel facilitators to generate more value out of the traffic they can attract to their websites.

Networking with executives from a good mix of OTAs, hotels, and airlines, we enjoyed to share best practices we’ve developed for our partners and had a fruitful discussion with great colleagues from Air Mauritius, ADARA and Spaces Genie on the topic “From Pokémon GO to artificial intelligence and virtual reality – How will the rapid evolution of technology change the way businesses and marketers gain insight?”.

Here are three insights we’ve gathered from Digital Travel APAC and wanted to share:

– Loyalty through tailored offers:

Expanding the offering from a simple transportation mode from point A to point B, there is an opportunity to differentiate yourself by facilitating the full experience from a flight, over the hotel, to afternoon activities. Making these experiences relevant and personalized to improve customer experience and convenience of booking can be a great way to gain an edge in the tough battle for customer attention.

– Industry players are exploring new technology to power enrich the user’s online experiences:

Virtual reality and augmented reality are hyped to see the application in travel soon. Actual applications are yet to be seen though as production cost are still very high.

– Understanding the customer was, is, and will be the key to success:

Customers are becoming more demanding and require us to serve them with the right content at the right time. In a time when loyalty is increasingly hard to generate, collecting relevant data effectively and being able to show the most relevant content in a timely manner will allow us to capture the users’ attention in the few moments we get with them. Meanwhile, the O2O trend is also catching on in travel.

For more information on how Insider empowers brands in the travel industry in delivering unique experiences to drive customer loyalty and booking revenue, check out our success stories with leading global brands.