Mobiles are the key to travel business, finds EyeForTravel study

18th January 2017
Mobiles are the key to  travel business, finds EyeForTravel study

Bangalore, January 18 2017: Most travellers today have a mobile or a tablet to help with the planning, search and the on trip experience.  How are  travel brands  leveraging these tools to make sure their connected traveller has the best possible experience?
Here are results of a survey by EyeForTravel  to get a market perspective,  from 164 travel experts in the travel industry to see what they thought about this reinvention of travel. Mobile was a clear winner for investment with focus on content marketing and customer experience following close. 
Currently there’s a lot of room for disruption in travel and the stakes are high. The prize will go to brands that can successfully offer a seamless connected experience. Partnerships, data and technological innovation will decide who wins and who loses out. With the internet powering the connected traveller in a way that is forcing travel brands to evolve the way they work, create new business models and service their customers we wanted to ask the industry what they thought.
So with this growth at stake and shift to mobile, data and technology to create the seamless travel experience we at EyeforTravel did a survey in May 2016 to look at what impacts customer experience, online marketing and mobile investment, and the impact of changes on the travel landscape in Europe. We had 183 respondents.
Here is what the travel community had to say…
The majority of our respondents came from Hotel, Airlines and Airports with 26% followed by technology or solution providers at 20%. We also had a strong presence of OTAs, metasearch and travel marketing companies. We also wanted to see what their job function was and we found 38% of the respondents had marketing in the job function followed by innovation/ tech and digital.
We also had a good number of C level and GM’s share their opinions. When it came to asking what would be the greatest opportunities to focus on in 2016 we had mobile as a clear winner at 79%, followed with content marketing at 58% followed by social media. Artificial intelligence, text based communication and application development  were other opportuities cited.

Biometric tools and robotics are not the main focus for our respondents for 2016. To build on that we asked what channel was their priority right now and we found the average rating shows web and online as the key priority followed by mobile and apps for marketing and engagement.
We found traditional in person meetings and telephone are seeing a decline. To reiterate the point above 40% said that they will be looking to increase their mobile and digital budget by 20% with a third saying they are looking to increase it by 50%. We went on to ask what they were going to watch out for, we had 79% who are focusing on increasing loyalty of customers, engaging with them and really understanding their needs, on the flipside they will also be keeping their eye on losing customers to competitors with better marketing. When asked how they are investing in travel IoT and how over 40% said technology through partnerships and then APIs.
The final question from us was, what they were losing sleep over and we got a range of answers from change management, OTA competition, big data management, digital budgets, slow pace, mobile conversion, competition and a few even mentioning Google.
The full report and infographic  is available here