Big Data Analytics in the Travel Industry: Types, Uses

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In order to succeed and compete in the travel industry, organizations need to deliver exceptional customer service, differentiate themself from competitors, and optimize their processes and offerings.

Learn how leveraging big data in travel and tourism can help your organization achieve those goals while increasing your revenue in the process.

Things to know about Travel Industry Data Analytics:

  1. What is Data Analytics?
  2. Types of Big Data Analytics in the Tourism Industry
  3. Data that can be analyzed in the travel industry
  4. 6 Uses of Data Analytics in the Travel Industry

What is Data Analytics?

Data analytics is the ability to leverage an organization’s data to help them gain deeper insights and enhanced decision-making capabilities. It helps organizations be more agile and proactive, ultimately gaining a competitive edge in the market.

Types of Big Data Analytics in the Tourism Industry

There are four primary types of data analysis:

  • Descriptive Analytics: Focuses on past events, leveraging historical data to identify trends and relationships
  • Predictive Analytics: Uses data, modeling, and machine learning (ML) to analyze current and historical data to make predictions about future outcomes
  • Diagnostic Analytics: Examines data to determine the causes of trends and relationships, answering the question, “Why did this happen?”
  • Prescriptive Analytics: Analyzes data to provide recommendations on the best course of action to achieve a desired outcome

Data that can be analyzed in the travel industry

Organizations in the travel industry have a vast array of data available to analyze and leverage, including:

  • Customer demographics
  • Customer searching, browsing, and buying behaviors
  • Customer reviews and feedback
  • Customer preferences on flights, destinations, accommodations, transportation, and meals
  • Data on internal operations

6 Uses of Data Analytics in the Travel Industry

  1. Targeted marketing
  2. Pricing and revenue optimization
  3. Improved recommendations
  4. Enhanced customer experiences
  5. Reputation management
  6. Competitor research

Targeted marketing in the travel industry

Collecting and analyzing large amounts of data can provide you with valuable insights into your customers’ preferences and their browsing, searching, and purchasing behaviors.

This enables you to know your customers’ wants and needs on a deeper level and tailor your marketing campaigns accordingly, delivering the kind of relevant, strategic marketing content and offers that will drive engagement and revenue.

Pricing and revenue optimization in the travel industry

Organizations can leverage a combination of internal and external data, including occupancy rates, popular events occurring in specific destinations, upcoming holidays, flights, and historic booking and occupancy data to more accurately and proactively predict demand.

This enables travel organizations to manage their room rates, airline ticket costs, travel packages, and other products and services to increase costs during peak periods of high demand, maximizing the generated revenue.

Improved recommendations in the travel industry

Leveraging historical data and predictive analytics can allow your organization to better understand individual users’ behaviors and recommend the relevant products and services that are most likely to drive conversions.

For instance, an effective, data-driven recommendation system can upsell your customers by recognizing that they are searching for the most affordable flight options and, as a result, would probably be more interested in cheaper accommodations than high-end hotels.

You can use customer data to upsell by making effective, personalized, relevant recommendations that will ultimately drive more sales and increase revenue.

Enhanced customer experiences in the travel industry

More than 70% of customers today say they expect the companies they interact with to understand their unique needs, desires, and expectations.

Travel organizations can leverage big data analysis to understand what their customers prefer and expect from their travel experiences, enabling the potential for a deep level of personalization. This can include:

  • Preselecting a customer’s preferred make and model of rental vehicle
  • Creating and offering more desirable tour packages
  • Offering travel deals and activities tailored to families with young children

Better reputation management

Big data analytics allows you to collect, process and analyze data from a variety of sources including complaint forms, AI chatbots, social media, and customer reviews.

This allows you to identify your greatest strengths that your customers are happy with, as well as your greatest weaknesses that customers frequently identify as pain points.

Your travel organization can leverage this information to adjust your processes, services and offerings, and internal training accordingly to ensure maximum levels of customer satisfaction, resulting in an improved brand reputation.

Competitor research in the travel industry

You can also conduct similar research on your business’s biggest competitors, collecting and analyzing data from social media and customer reviews.

This enables your brand to identify your competitors’ greatest strengths that you should strive to match, if not surpass, as well as their greatest weaknesses. This information is incredibly valuable, as it can empower your business leaders to identify gaps and opportunities in the market.

You can use this information to clearly differentiate yourself from other players in the space and give your organization a competitive advantage, ultimately driving greater revenue.

Leverage the Full Value of Your Travel Data

When you look to turn insights into action, it’s helpful to have experts in your corner.

At AIM Consulting, we leverage proven analytics methodologies, best practices, and tools to define the right analytics solutions for your travel and tourism organization’s needs, solving complex business challenges and driving future growth and greater profits.

Our high-performing teams are ready to deliver a custom-fit data analytics solution that will enable you to empower your business’s decision-makers with the right information, optimize your organization’s processes, and dramatically improve your customer experience.

Need Help Creating Impact From Insightful Data?

We help companies strategize, design, build, and operationalize data and analytical platforms through our high-performing teams of data engineers, architects, data scientists, and analysts.