customer journey travel booking

The Travel Customer Journey Through Industry Trends (With Infographic)

In the modern-day, so many elements of the travel experience take place online. From inspiration to research, price comparisons to booking, and most importantly reviews and storytelling, the possibilities of travel via the internet are endless.

The trend of travel agencies being replaced by travel and tour websites , and almost all forms of travel booking (at every stage) having online options, is nothing new – however, as it grows and grows, more data becomes available to us. This means that it’s now easier than ever to study trends in niches and interests within the industry, analyze the data, and draw conclusions.

We’ve put together this guide, with an infographic, looking at various points of pain and ease throughout the travel customer’s journey – all the way from inspiration, through the entirety of the holiday and into the post-trip stage. Let’s take a look at the infographic, and explore some of these points in more detail.

Travel Industry Trends 2020: Where to Meet Your Customers

Throughout any stage of the travel customer journey, it’s extremely important to know what industry customers want to receive – whether it be in terms of promotion, guidance, or help. If you’re able to meet the needs of your customers exactly where it suits them the most, you’ll find customer satisfaction rises, and the likelihood of repeat customers increasing.

However, there are some parts of this multi-stage research and booking travel journey that vary depending on your own business model, the kinds of campaigns you run, the channels you use, etc. Let’s take a look first at the infographic we’ve put together, and then run through each point in finer detail.

1. Inspiring Customer Travel

Inspiration is probably the most common element of travel that we see in online travel niches. Whether it’s flashy, aesthetically pleasing photos, emails to mailing list subscribers, influencers showing off the hotel they’re at, or eco-tourism (which is becoming increasingly popular) – inspiration appears to be the key.

Whether it’s a short, week-long trip to a popular destination or a remote retreat into the wilderness, most travellers these days will cite some sort of rich online media in inspiring them to travel. These simple things that most travel and tourism businesses could easily do can make a huge difference, and aside from word of mouth, can be some of the biggest trendsetters in travel.

Just look at the studies on influencer marketing , that discusses how much so-called ‘key opinion leaders’ have changed the playing field. Any travel brand agent should know by now just how key these new opportunities are.

2. Shopping Trends Through Travel Industry Research

Shopping for travel options on the web often has the connotation of being easier for the customer, and more difficult for the providers with things like competitive paid advertising and browser cookies. However, this doesn’t always have to be the case.

If you can understand the shopping trends of your customers, and how they’re looking for holidays, packages and products, it’s much easier to meet them halfway. It’s little things like making sure your pricing currency changes based on viewer location, keeping information easy to digest and approachable, and making sure that your packages are flexible that can really set you apart from the competition.

As travel marketing and SEO experts , we’ve seen first-hand that given two equal travel options, customers will almost always go for the option that is presented in a simple and straightforward manner – provided they can change little things here and there to suit their trip.

3. How Customers Book Holidays Online

Now, when it comes to booking, things get a little less travel-oriented, making space for some discussion of UI / UX and other elements of digital marketing that are less niche-specific.

We’ve all been at that stage in the online purchasing pipeline where a bad webpage or a faulty booking app simply puts you off and makes you rethink your purchase. These kinds of hiccups can be easily mitigated with a developer who has a good sense of design and user experience.

Little things like web security, mobile booking options, making sure you’re optimising your most successful sales channels, and of course, making the booking process a straightforward and easy task all contribute towards customer retention at this point in their journey.

4. 1-2 Days After Booking – What the Customer Wants

At this point, the customer has made the first of two big jumps – booking (with the second being getting on the flight). This means they’re in a particular mindset, where you probably don’t need to be targeting them with more tour adverts. A better approach might be to give them some space, and reassurance.

Reassurance can come in many forms, whether it’s confirmations that their hotels and flights are all booked (with a polite reminder pointing to any other options they may have, ie. flexible departure or extras they purchased). It’s a nice time to back off a little bit as a tour provider, just keeping yourself at a distance where you’re still in close contact if any worries come to mind.

5. 1-2 Days After Departure – What the Customer Needs

This is the second big jump of the customer’s journey, however at this point, any sort of stress about the trip is likely waning, being replaced by nervous excitement. Departure is a great point at which to really try and get the customer in the pipeline to get ecstatic about their adventure.

Cross-selling can be promoting other tours, activities or accommodation in the region the customer is in or monitoring all the stages of their trip to make sure they’re not missing a bus here, or getting on the wrong flight there. It’s this sort of ‘customised’ attention to detail that can help instil a strong sense of your company being a ‘journey brand’ – that is to say, one that is invested in the trip in its entirety.

6. Check-in: Where the Consumer’s Journey Begins

It’s at this point, however, that we revert to older, more tried and tested methods of customer retention in travel. As anyone who has been to a hotel would know, loyalty or points systems, special cardholder levels, and specials for those who are in-the-know are an integral part of this stage of the journey.

If a customer has been to a hotel multiple times, the system should recognise this as soon as they check-in, and present some form of loyalty reward. If you’re a bed and breakfast, why not check if your solo traveller might not enjoy that double suite that isn’t booked up this month?

Customers like to feel special, just like anyone, and if you’re returning to a destination (or even visiting a new one with similar transport or accommodation chains), somewhere familiar where you were treated with care is the place you would no doubt want to return to.

7. The Airport – Customer Experience Trends

Airports are, of course, another key area of the travel experience where, just like many other stages of travel, there’s a great opportunity for customer satisfaction, and a chance to improve upon their experience.

Airports don’t have to have the nightmarish reputation that follows them around (especially when you’re talking about layovers). Whether it’s duty-free shopping, interesting airport features or updates about their destination (weather, timeframe, etc) – there’s always a way to keep things relaxed.

8. On-trip – a Travel Journey Map

The airport experience follows over to the flight itself, and the layovers and additional travel that still remain. At this point, your customers should be happily sat aboard a plane, or waiting to board a connecting flight halfway across the world – probably watching a movie on their laptop or lost in a novel, if they’re not asleep.

Arrival times and comfort are two essential elements at this point, and other than hot tips about meals or comfort items on the airline they’re flying with, the travellers aren’t probably worried about much else.

9. Post Trip – Traveller Customer Service is Key

Finally, we’re at the post-trip stage. The customer should be satisfied, if not thrilled with their new experience, and as we’ve all felt before, eager and ready to travel again to a new and exciting destination.

Because of this, you want to make sure you’ve put in the effort to stay in touch with the customer so that you’re their first choice the next time they’re looking to go on a holiday. Ideally, you’d have them on a mailing list by this point (which should be a standard part of your online sign-up process), and ideally, a record of their trip connected to this profile.

Things like customer experience and feedback and other information you may have about their travel patterns (such as ‘liked’ tours or destinations on your website) should give you a larger profile of their preferences. This is also the exact sort of data you would need for some targeted online advertising – where you can further ensure customer satisfaction and interest by only showing them content you know they would be interested in.

The Online Journey of Booking a Holiday in Conclusion

Breaking down the process of customer relationship management and satisfaction like we have above, makes it easier to visualise and understand the process. This makes it easier to ensure not only a happy customer but a returning one – and one who is all the more likely to recommend your business to others.

These processes are often a lot easier to understand when split up like this, and easier to tend to, as you can quite easily identify the gaps, bottlenecks or shortfalls in your own business model. It’s always important to remember that at the end of the day, any customer is a person just like yourself. ( https://safeanimalshelter.com/ ) They have habits which can be identified, preferences to be satisfied, and experiences to be had.

If you can help, if even a little to make their experience a memorable one, you can rest assured knowing that they’re all the more likely to come back for more.

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The 7 Effective Travel Customer Journey Mapping Stages

Last Updated on February 26, 2024 by The Digital Travel Expert

Welcome to the realm of travel customer journey mapping, a dynamic process that transcends mere transactions to create unforgettable memories.

In a world where travel isn’t just a means to an end but an experience in itself, understanding the intricate dance between customer expectations and service delivery is paramount.

But what exactly does it entail, and why is it crucial for travel businesses across diverse niches?

Join us on an exploration as we unravel the layers of effective stages. From luxury escapades to budget-friendly adventures, we’ll delve into how businesses in various niches can craft experiences that resonate deeply with their clientele.

Embark on this journey with us as we navigate through the stages, from the initial spark of inspiration to the post-trip reflections, discovering the pivotal touchpoints that define memorable travel experiences.

Whether you’re a seasoned traveler seeking new insights or a business owner aiming to enhance customer satisfaction, this exploration promises to provoke thought and inspire innovation.

Buckle up as we embark on a voyage through the realms of customer journey stages, where every stage holds the potential to transform a simple trip into an extraordinary odyssey.

Table of Contents

1. Understanding customer journey map in the travel and hospitality Industry

The travel journey map refers to the process that customers go through while thinking about, planning, and experiencing a trip. It involves several stages, starting with the initial inspiration and research phase, followed by the booking and preparation stage, and finally culminating in the actual travel experience and post-trip reflections.

Understanding the stages of the customer journey in the travel industry helps businesses understand the touchpoints and emotions that customers encounter at each stage. It enables them to provide personalized and memorable experiences that meet the customers’ needs and expectations . Understanding client journey mapping will also allow your travel business to identify potential pain points and areas for improvement to enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Importance of understanding unique specificities

The importance of identifying unique needs and challenges as the first step in journey mapping will make a difference. This brings back the need for tour companies or hotels to focus on a travel niche that aligns with their expertise and resources. If you are going for a luxury travel niche , it makes sense to have a clue as to what an affluent tourist will need to have a memorable and exclusive experience.

With the unique needs and expectations of customers at each touchpoint, your luxury travel businesses will tailor offerings and communications for a seamless and delightful experience. The travel industry is different from other online businesses in that it involves an online experience but most importantly, the human touch.  

– Overview of journey mapping structure in the travel industry

This article will again discuss in depth the unique needs and expectations of tourists and how travel businesses can cater to them. It will then highlight the importance of tailoring offerings and communications for a seamless and delightful experience. Next, it will emphasize the customer journey analysis in the travel industry, starting with the online experience but ultimately leveraging the human touch. Finally, the article will conclude by emphasizing the significance of this distinction in the online business landscape. Let’s explore the pre-travel stage now. 

2. Discovery Stage of the Traveler Journey Mapping

During the discovery stage, potential travelers are seeking inspiration and information about their next destination, not necessarily knowing which one . Probably the client read a book about a certain country, studied history at school, or saw a sports athlete from a specific country perform exceptionally well. There are reasons why people choose certain travel destinations over others, and these reasons can vary greatly from person to person.  Some may be drawn to the natural beauty and landscapes of a certain country shown on TV or in travel magazines. Others may be interested in the rich history and cultural heritage that a destination has to offer.

For instance, some avid adventurers who enjoy adrenaline-inducing activities in the USA may have an idea about similar activities in other countries. Similarly, those who appreciate the arts and architecture in one city may be curious about experiencing them in different parts of the world. In a few words, the inspiration stage is an important piece of stages of the client journey.

3. Pre-travel Stage

– Inspiration and research

People travel for different reasons. Whatever reasons and needs lead travelers to think about planning a trip, tourism businesses must understand the challenges their target audience goes through. During the pre-travel stage, tourists seek inspiration and conduct extensive research to plan their trips. They explore various online platforms, such as travel websites, social media influencers , and review sites, to gather information about destinations, accommodations, activities, and local experiences. 

To capture your clients’ attention and stand out from the competition, your travel business must create compelling travel content that sparks curiosity and provides valuable insights.  It’s not enough to draw attention, but being able to deliver on the concrete needs of your target audience will help your tour company or hotel thrive in the long term. Running a travel business is like running a long-term relationship with people. 

– Digital platforms and social media as primary sources of information.

Travelers no longer rely on print magazines as their only source of information. Digital marketing and communication have revolutionized the way travel businesses, destinations, and travelers connect. However, the digital sphere has a lot of options and can be overwhelming to navigate. From social media to influencer marketing and travel SEO strategy , endless digital marketing strategies exist to explore and implement.

Your travel business needs to leverage platforms and strategies that align with your target audience and business goals and, most importantly, where you can meet your target market. Finding the right sphere where your clients hang out is the key to client journey mapping. Whatever marketing channel you choose, make sure your communications address their problems and challenges.  

– Influence of reviews and ratings

You know how reviews influence your purchasing decision before buying a product from Amazon or any e-commerce website. The travel industry isn’t different. So, your tour company reviews play a significant role in convincing potential customers about your travel business services . Positive travel reviews and high ratings on platforms such as TripAdvisor tend to boost confidence in customers and increase the likelihood of them choosing your tour company for their travel needs.

However, the way you respond to negative reviews and handle customer complaints can also greatly impact your reputation and potential for future business success . So, in their journey to finding the right tour company, your response and resolution to any negative feedback will play a crucial role. 

Regardless of what reviews and ratings say about your travel company, they are an integral part of the journey. 

– Role of travel businesses

In most cases, your travel business has the power to make the online experience seamless. The role of travel businesses goes beyond just providing services and packages to customers. You need to educate, inform, and assist tourists from the online to the field experience. To do this effectively, tourism businesses( usually travel agencies and hotels) must leverage technology that streamlines not only the booking process but also enhances communication and provides personalized recommendations.

In tourism, there is such a thing as pre-tour customer satisfaction or experience. Digital transformation and human skills go hand in hand for a seamless and enjoyable journey for travelers.

– Planning and booking

This is a crucial stage for both travelers and the tour businesses involved. On the one hand, the tourist goes through stages of gauging if the travel company they find is the right one. On the other hand, the travel company needs to ensure that they provide a seamless and satisfactory customer experience to pass the vetting process. Let’s explore them one by one. 

– Comparison of different travel options

When you want to book a hotel room in a destination, you will need to compare hotel rates. The same applies to your customers. Your excellent online customer experience is not convincing enough for travelers to book with your tour company.  Your pricing strategy needs to take your target audience into consideration . Your clients will email two or three travel companies to make an informed decision and choose the most suitable one for their needs and budget. Your client journey mapping is also defined by your pricing strategy. 

– Consideration of budget and preferences

Budget is not the only deciding factor. Other factors should be taken into account. The travel packages should be designed in a way that meets your target market’s budget and preferences while also aligning with your pricing strategy. The overall customer experience, tour offerings, and complementary services are also important considerations.

– Importance of clear and transparent booking processes

Travelers hate unexpected costs the same way you do when shopping online. They want to know exactly what they’re paying for and not be hit with hidden fees or charges. This should be clearly stated in your offerings on your website; otherwise, a lack of clear information can disrupt the search prematurely. 

– Preparing for the trip

So far, so good; the client has booked the trip with you and is excited about it. The journey hasn’t stopped. Is there any extra information about the trip that the client needs to know, or is everything clear and ready? Whether it is an update about your destination or an event happening during their travel period, the client will be happy to receive this information.

– Gathering necessary travel documents

Is the visa available on arrival, or should it be applied for before their trip? Supplying all required information about vaccinations, visas, and any other necessary travel documents will prove your professionalism. And you want to be known as such.

– Packing and organizing essentials

Just imagine the expectations or fears you had when you traveled abroad for the first time. Traveling overseas can be overwhelming, but with thorough preparation, it can be an unforgettable experience. Nobody wants to carry unnecessary clothes that won’t be worn. 

– Managing expectations and setting goals

On the traveler’s side, before embarking on the booking trip, the client will take some time to manage their expectations and set realistic goals. Even though they understand that not everything may go as planned, they will keep a positive mindset, and being adaptable will make the experience more enjoyable. As a tour service provider, being in the shoes of the traveler will allow you to better understand their needs and provide a more personalized and satisfying experience.

You will be more prepared to help them achieve their goals. Whether it’s learning a new language, immersing oneself in the local culture, or simply creating lasting memories, you have the power to enhance a traveler’s experience. 

4. Travel Stage

– Departure and transportation

If your tour package includes assistance with booking flights and airport transfers, you must provide detailed information about transportation options at the destination. Clear communication alleviates any stress or confusion your clients may have once they land. Picking up your clients from the airport on time is the first impression of the actual tour. It sets the tone for the rest of the tour. A quick briefing about the activities of the following day is something that should be observed at all times. 

– Logistics and coordination of travel arrangements

The best travel management will ensure a smooth and enjoyable experience for your clients. This means comfortable transportation to and from airports, hotels, and various tour destinations. This is a crucial moment. If you carefully manage the required logistics, you will minimize any potential delays or inconveniences that may arise during the trip. Again, if things don’t go according to plan, make sure you have a plan B already set. Having a backup plan can help avoid major disruptions and keep everything on track. Remember, the traveler has built his goals based on the detailed itinerary. Your travel business should always strive to deliver on its promises and be flexible and adaptable in case any unexpected changes occur. 

– Airport procedures and security checks

Airport procedures are usually the same, but not always. It is important to provide enough information about any special requirements when entering or exiting the destination. Are there any airport taxes, fees, or additional charges that need to be paid? If well prepared, the traveler can better manage their time and avoid unnecessary stress. 

-Modes of transportation and their unique experiences

Remember, the itinerary submitted to the traveler is a highlight of the main sites or activities they will do. A well-versed tour service provider will be able to improvise and suggest additional sites or activities based on the traveler’s preferences and interests. This comes from the communication between the traveler and the guide. Those unique experiences usually make the most of their time and create unforgettable memories. They can be anything from exploring hidden gems in the city to participating in local cultural events. Those small details will make a difference and add depth and meaning to their overall travel experience.

– Accommodation specificities

The choice of the accommodation facility is important for the tour experience. The travel company should be able to choose or at least recommend hotels or even unique accommodations like eco-lodges or homestays that align with the traveler’s preferences and budget. The quality of the accommodation and meals plays an important role in ensuring a satisfying and memorable travel experience . 

– Choosing the right type of accommodation

The right accommodation doesn’t mean the most popular hotel in the city. There is no conventional best accommodation. Great accommodation means finding a place that suits the traveler’s needs and preferences, whether that be a cozy bed and breakfast or a luxury resort. The accommodation should provide comfort, convenience, and a sense of relaxation for the traveler to truly enjoy their trip. 

– Checking-in and room selection

In the same way that some travelers prefer aisle seats when flying, some clients will need a room facing the beach. Hotels often offer various room options and amenities. If you happen to have a client with a specific preference for a room, just inform the hotel in advance so they can accommodate their request. Small details like this can make a big difference in the overall experience. Going the extra mile for your clients is not cheap. 

– Amenities and services provided by the accommodation

Tourists don’t only focus on the quality of the room and meals when rating a hotel. From luxurious spas and gyms to complimentary breakfast and concierge services, these offerings can elevate their stay and leave a lasting impression. They also consider the overall ambiance, cleanliness, and customer service. Your role as a travel company is to partner with hotels and lodges that won’t compromise the quality of your client’s tour experiences. 

– Experiencing the destination

Travelers choose a destination for different reasons. Whether it is an adventure of a lifetime, a cultural experience, or simply relaxation, the goal is always to create memories that will leave a lasting impression. Help your guests go and explore the world, embrace new experiences, and make unforgettable memories. The possibilities are endless when it comes to creating lasting impressions and unforgettable memories.

– Engaging in local culture and traditions

This is a key to gaining a deeper understanding of the place they are visiting. From trying traditional cuisine to participating in local festivals and rituals, these experiences provide a unique insight into the customs and way of life of the destination. Engaging in local culture and traditions not only enriches the travel experience but also fosters connections with the local community, creating meaningful interactions that will be cherished for years to come. That’s where the tour guide’s expertise comes in handy.

5. Online Reviews and Recommendations 

It has become a culture for travelers to review tourist attractions and tour companies they have traveled with.  Reviews and recommendations from satisfied clients greatly impact the reputation of your company. Whether they are happy with your services or not, your clients will likely share their experiences on third-party travel platforms like TripAdvisor and others. You shouldn’t sit and watch. A week or so after the tour, email your clients and ask them if you can write a review about their travel experience.

Don’t be shy about telling them how it helps your business. While not all satisfied clients will write a review, at least they will know you value them and appreciate their feedback.

6. Offline recommendations: word of mouth

If your company has amazed them, travelers will tell their families and friends where they have been and about the great tour company that treated them well. It is so easy to share a story or a recommendation with others, especially when they have had such a positive experience. The story isn’t only about the destination but everything that goes with it—people, food, weather,…

There are travel clubs where tourists who share a common interest in exploring new places can connect and exchange their experiences, tips, and advice. It could be a club for luxury travelers, hiking, wildlife adventure, and heritage travel. Whatever club your clients belong to, make sure they have a positive experience. Your great (or poor) customer experience will be communicated to fellow travelers. 

7. Loyalty stage: booking again with your travel company

-Repeat travelers 

If you offer services that your clients can book more than once, the happy ones will come back to you for future trips and recommend your company to others. Your travel company must earn their loyalty by providing exceptional experiences and top-notch customer service. Travelers who come back to you will usually value the trust, personalized attention, and seamless planning process that your company offers. Although the journey for a loyal traveler isn’t the same as a first-time one, you should never compromise on service quality.

In the same way you pay attention to small details for new travelers, you should do the same for loyal ones too. If you have a chance of going further, do it. Are there any discounts, special offers, loyalty cards, or rewards your company can provide? Build a loyalty culture for those repeat clients. 

-Referral programs

If you are more serious and ambitious about your travel business, you should understand a referral program as part of the stages.  While some travelers will recommend your services to friends and colleagues without any compensation in return, it will make more sense for most travelers if they can get a reward for their referrals. It could be an Amazon voucher or a commission on bookings made through their referrals. Referral is a practice you will always find in an e-commerce customer journey.

The referral program works well with travel bloggers and influencers . It is a great way to incentivize loyal customers to refer your services to their friends and family. When you offer discounts or rewards for successful referrals, you not only encourage repeat business but also expand your customer base through word-of-mouth marketing. 

What is Customer journey mapping?

Customer journey mapping is a strategic tool used to understand and visualize the entire experience a customer goes through when interacting with a brand or product. It helps businesses identify pain points, opportunities for improvement, and areas where they can enhance customer satisfaction. You can find a free customer journey map template but you should always personalize it.

Example of customer journey map

One example of a customer journey map in the travel industry is the Out-of-market Stage, where potential travelers become aware of different destinations and start dreaming about their next vacation. During the Awareness Stage, they begin researching and gathering information about various travel options. In the Consideration Stage, they narrow down their choices and compare prices, itineraries, and reviews. The Intent Stage is when they make a decision and start planning their trip in detail. The Purchase Stage is when they book their flights and accommodations.

How to create a customer journey map

The first step involves understanding your target audience and their pain points to find a solution to their travel needs.

What are some common challenges faced during journey mapping and how can they be overcome?

Some common challenges faced during journey mapping include limited access to customer data, difficulty in identifying all touchpoints, and resistance from stakeholders. These challenges can be overcome by conducting thorough research to gather customer data, using techniques like customer interviews and surveys. Additionally, involving stakeholders early on in the process and addressing their concerns can help mitigate resistance and ensure their buy-in

What tools or resources can assist me in conducting effective journey mapping? 

There are several tools and resources available to assist you in conducting effective journey mapping. Some popular options include customer journey mapping software, such as UXPressia or Smaply, which provide templates and visualization tools to help you map out the traveler’s journey. Additionally, conducting customer surveys, and interviews, and analyzing customer feedback can provide valuable insights for journey mapping. It is also helpful to consult industry research and case studies to gain a deeper understanding of best practices and successful strategies in journey mapping. 

How can journey mapping benefit my business?

Journey mapping can benefit your business in several ways. Firstly, it helps you gain a deeper understanding of your customers’ experiences and emotions throughout their journey with your company. This allows you to identify pain points and areas for improvement, leading to enhanced customer satisfaction and loyalty. Additionally, journey mapping helps you align your business processes and strategies with the customer’s needs, resulting in more effective and targeted marketing campaigns . Ultimately, journey mapping can lead to increased customer retention and business growth.

What are the frequent challenges to travel journey mapping?

They include accurately capturing all the details and experiences of the trip, as well as organizing and presenting them in a visually appealing and informative way. Additionally, incorporating subjective elements such as emotions and personal reflections can be challenging, as they may vary from person to person. 

What makes travel company or hotel journey mapping effective?

Travel company or hotel journey mapping is effective because it provides a comprehensive understanding of the customer’s experience throughout their entire travel journey. It helps identify pain points, areas of improvement, and opportunities for delivering exceptional customer service.

Customer journey maps for travel agencies

It includes several stages. First, the customer becomes aware of the travel agency through various marketing channels, such as advertisements or word-of-mouth recommendations. Next, they research different travel options and destinations offered by the agency. They may also compare prices and read reviews to make an informed decision. Once they have chosen a travel package, they book their trip through the agency and receive confirmation of their reservation. During the trip, the customer may encounter any issues or challenges that need to be resolved by contacting the agency’s customer service. 

Wrapping up

The common understanding of the travel customer journey involves the initial inspiration and research phases, where customers may seek inspiration from various sources such as friends, family, or online platforms. Once a destination is chosen, customers move on to the planning and booking phase, where they search for the best deals and accommodations that match their travel preferences. 

Despite the many customer journey mapping tools, travel companies need to understand their clients to provide a personalized and tailored travel experience. During the trip, customers experience the actual travel phase, which includes transportation, accommodation, and activities. Whatever customer journey map templates you use, remember that tourism is about a personal journey and creating lasting memories for individuals, always keeping in mind the unique experiences and preferences of each traveler. In a few words, customer journey map examples will give you inspiration on how you can build yours according to your travel niche. 

Keep in mind these seven stages: Out-of-market Stage, Awareness Stage, Consideration Stage, Intent Stage, Purchase Stage, Post-Purchase Stage, and Advocacy Stage. These seven stages are essential for creating a successful travel niche.

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What Are the 5 Stages of the Travel Consumer Journey?

August 12, 2020.

Each vacation takes you somewhere exciting, but they all start in the same place: at home! From sitting on the couch planning a dream getaway to exploring the destination to reliving each moment on the trip back home, each stage of the travel consumer journey has an important role to play. The right marketing strategy recognizes these stages and turns dreamers into paying customers. 

If you want to learn more about how to use the travel purchase funnel as an actionable strategy for your bed and breakfast, hotel, or vacation rental company, follow our guidelines below. If you’d like additional information, don’t hesitate to reach out to a member of our team . The digital-marketing experts here at Q4Launch are always available to help!

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A Guide to the Travel Consumer Journey

Mapping the consumer journey is a critical step in designing a thoughtful marketing plan that drives traffic and bookings. Before you can drive business, you have to understand what it takes to target consumers at each phase of the travel experience. Let’s dive into the five stages of the travel consumer journey.

1. DREAMING

Whether a traveler is considering a well-deserved foray into the mountains, a relaxing retreat to the beach, or a thrilling trip into the heart of their favorite city, it all starts with a dream. Before any technical planning begins, the traveler is already thinking about where their next vacation might be! Influence and inspiration can strike at any moment and come from anywhere. That’s why getting your brand in front of your target audience is key. 

Here are a few ways that you should be targeting consumers in the “dreaming” stage of the consumer travel journey:

• Promote your brand on social media
• Showcase artful and inspiring photographs
• Write compelling SEO-optimized copy .

While these three practices seem easy to accomplish on the surface, implementing a strategy for your urban hotel , lodge , vacation rental company , or bed and breakfast is often much different in practice. Q4Launch is here to help! 

2. PLANNING

Many travelers remain in the dreaming phase for quite some time, while others may emerge from the initial stage in the travel consumer journey and set themselves on the path to purchase rather quickly. Either way, the “planning” portion of the journey must be completed. Your oh-so-important role in this phase is to be part of your future guest’s travel “micro moments.”

Travelers decide where to stay based on what will maximize their experience at their chosen destination. Many will fall back on Google Travel or generic attraction-based platforms while searching for their best options. With so many large corporations seemingly owning the travel space, it may appear impossible for your brand to become recognized online. However, this way of thinking will only hinder your impact in the travel space! 

These convenient options offer a glimpse into a traveler’s thought process and provide insight you need to become a stepping stone for travelers that are planning their getaway. As locals, you occupy a completely unique space in the travel industry. This will be the key to success for your brand as you implement the following strategies:

• Using content that includes long-tail keywords 
• Curating someone’s experience in the form of an interactive lead generation tool
• Allowing someone to dream and plan simultaneously through engaging website content
• Offering the type of accommodation your target demographic desires
• Investing in pay-per-click advertisements
• Assisting an indecisive traveler with a quiz-style questionnaire
• Having a visually appealing website for your vacation rental company , boutique hotel , or B&B .

All of these elements embody the same fundamental value: convenience. When the copy on a website has adequately provided the “best answer” for search engines, it satisfies the algorithm and becomes a result on the first page. Thus, providing a two-fold strategy for success implies to the user that you are, in fact, the best overall answer. After all, if you aren’t listed on Page 1 of Google, is your business reaching the heights that it can (and should)?

For Bed and Breakfasts

• Clearly display prices
• Use buttons to advertise/encourage bookings
• Use an intuitive reservation software such as ThinkReservations or ResNexus
• Add any discounts, coupon codes, and add-ons into your system
• Send a confirmation email to each guest.

For Vacation Rental Companies

It’s imperative to exercise transparency when it comes to pricing, amenities, guest experiences, and confirmation emails. These requirements are similar to those of bed and breakfasts, but one vital difference between the two has to do with booking directly. While booking engines work well for B&Bs and inns, there has been an ongoing debate about this for vacation rental companies. Online travel agencies and their ability to advertise the lowest price guarantee have complicated matters, but there are ways to avoid these giants. Since affordability and convenience appeal to travelers, OTAs often hide additional fees. The best way for your vacation rental business to capitalize on this market is to advertise just that on your site. Use phrasing like:

• “Book direct for the lowest price”
• “Lowest price guaranteed when booking directly”
• “Best rate when booking direct.”

Many of our Q4Launch customers — bed and breakfasts, boutique hotels, inns, and vacation rentals — have consistently seen an increase in transactions and total online revenue from using this messaging. We believe that you can, too!

4. EXPERIENCING

• Curated itineraries
• A travel guide full of your local recommendations.

This stage is the time when you may positively influence someone’s time in your area. It’s important that your property is top-of-mind for current, future, and repeat guests! After all, you want to be known as the expert on the area, not search engines or cookie-cutter online databases.

What Comes of a Guest’s Positive Experience with You?

• A positive reputation on Google, TripAdvisor, and Facebook (and other review platforms)
• Happy guests promote your brand and become an engaged follower on social media
• They may also become a return guest in the future, which guarantees revenue.

5. REMEMBERING

What you’ve provided to guests and how they experience your area will directly impact the way a guest remembers their time. Capturing guest reviews from those who have had an overwhelmingly positive experience is key to maintaining both a 5-star presence online and a successful business. 

Additionally, their positive time on the property and with your business influences their next getaway! However, it’s imperative you create some form of re-engagement to further keep them involved in your brand.

How to Help Guests Remember You

• Implement an effective email marketing strategy that contains both the template and the copy
• Set up guest lifestyle campaigns in your marketing efforts
• Try to obtain as many 5-star reviews as you can
• Use creative, strategic thinking when crafting Facebook posts and your presence on social media.

Trust Q4Launch: Your Travel Destination Experts

Now that you know what it takes to follow vacationers along the travel consumer journey, it’s time to put what you’ve learned into practice — which is often easier said than done. Managing your hotel and your marketing strategy at the same time can feel like a balancing act. One misstep and it can all come crashing down. 

Luckily, Q4Launch has a team of expert digital-marketing strategists, designers, website developers, and professional copywriters that are trained to design and execute marketing campaigns that inspire your audience and drive ROI for your business. 

Don’t take our word for it, though. Read some of our customer success stories to get a better sense of how we create campaigns that delight customers and get results for your brand. If you’re looking to increase your average revenue per guest as quickly as possible, Q4Launch’s brand new product on our Future Proof ® platform is designed to do just that. Drive revenue, get more 5-star reviews, and generate more rebookings with our Guest LifeCycle Automation . 

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Travel Customer Journey: Making Data-Driven Decisions

Alexander Ragin

April 25, 2024

What is a travel customer journey?

Why it’s important to understand the customer journey, travel customer journey stages, what is a travel customer journey map, benefits of customer journey mapping, how to map the travel customer journey, what software should i use to optimize a guest's journey.

The travel industry is changing. Nowadays, perfecting the customer journey means taking a data-driven approach instead of a service-driven view , and gathering valuable information on customers’ behaviors and preferences to inform decision-making.

With so much data at our fingertips, travel businesses are expected to craft seamless, personalized experiences for each customer, so don’t fall behind. You need to know how to gather, analyze, and utilize this data at every step of the travel customer journey.

Making use of data at every customer touchpoint enables you to personalize services, optimize operations, and improve overall customer satisfaction. Let's take a look at what a typical customer journey consists of and how you can use data to enhance each stage.

The travel customer journey is the entire experience a traveler goes through , from the moment they first think about taking a trip to when they return home with new, unforgettable memories. It covers all the emotions, decisions, and activities involved in their travel.

The idea of a customer journey views traveling as a continuous process that starts with inspiration and doesn't just end when the trip does, but continues as travelers share their stories, possibly inspiring others on their own journeys. Thinking of a trip in stages like this offers a useful way of reviewing and enhancing the overall experience.

Understanding the travel customer journey is crucial because it provides valuable insights into travelers' preferences and behaviors. Mapping out the stages a traveler goes through can provide your business with a deeper understanding of their needs and expectations — and that enables you to tailor your products and services accordingly.

This, in return, ultimately enhances customer satisfaction — when you know how to appeal to your customers at every single moment they interact with your business, you can guarantee their satisfaction with your services and encourage them to come back for more.

Analyzing the customer journey can also help you identify pain points and areas for improvement, increasing your competitiveness in the travel industry.

Inspiration

In the inspiration stage, potential travelers find themselves consuming travel content from their social media feeds, magazines, travel documentaries, and other sources, and then deciding that they want to travel themselves. Recommendations from trusted friends, influential figures, and seasoned travelers also go a long way in sparking that initial idea.

As a travel company, your goal during this crucial stage is to help travelers visualize their future journey with the help of beautiful images and destination videos, showcasing all of the great aspects that lie ahead. How well you showcase the offer is often a deciding factor in whether they move to the next travel stage or not.

Consider tailoring your content to travelers' preferences based on their past interactions and interests. Implementing algorithms that analyze travel data and past bookings can help with suggesting destinations and activities that resonate with each customer's unique tastes.

SEO optimization will also be extremely helpful — the higher you can get your travel offer in search results, the more users will find it and interact with your business . And one more thing — utilizing the full potential of social media is absolutely necessary for getting noticed today. Think of how much attention you can get from younger travelers with one well-timed TikTok video, or an Instagram post that hooks onto a current trend.

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The planning stage is the moment travelers transition from inspiration to concrete decision-making regarding their future journey. This is when they try to find as much relevant travel information as they can and explore their options, from flights to accommodation, considering costs, comfort, and other logistics.

During this research phase, travelers often turn to tourism operators, their local destination marketing organization, and trusted websites as information sources. They’ll often rely heavily on travel guides, online reviews from review sites, and direct contact with travel agents who can create a well-organized itinerary.

Introducing a user-friendly interface to your website and developing an intuitive mobile app will allow potential customers to effortlessly research, compare, and organize their itineraries in one centralized platform, streamlining their whole experience.

At the same time, integrating real-time updates on travel advisories, weather forecasts, and local events will empower travelers to make informed decisions and adapt their plans accordingly.

Offering personalized recommendations and expert guidance through chatbots or dedicated travel advisors can also resolve any uncertainties and enhance customers' confidence.

The booking phase is all about the definitive moment when travelers commit to a specific choice and book their trip with the help of booking platforms, hotel websites, and online travel agencies. The booking process is generally a meticulous task, so travel companies should prioritize transparency and flexibility in their process.

One way to do that is to implement convenient booking flows and advanced search filters to help customers navigate the process with ease. Introducing multiple payment options with secure encryption protocols will also help.

Finally, incorporating loyalty rewards programs or exclusive perks for repeat bookings can incentivize customer retention, encourage repeat business, and foster long-term relationships.

This is the post-purchase stage, when final travel arrangements are made. Travelers pack their bags and check their travel documentation to prepare for the journey ahead. But even for the most organized travelers, this stage can be stressful and create some anxiety .

During the pre-trip stage, a travel company can significantly enhance the customer journey by providing comprehensive and tailored pre-departure resources. Think of a user-friendly platform or app where travelers can access all necessary information in one place, from destination guides and weather forecasts to packing lists and visa requirements.

Offering help through chatbots or dedicated customer service agents can address any queries or concerns, ensuring peace of mind for customers . Providing timely updates on travel advisories, safety protocols, and health guidelines also demonstrates your company's commitment to prioritizing the well-being of its travelers.

The in-trip stage is the travel experience itself, which makes it the most important phase of the journey. During this stage, leisure travelers arrive at their destination, visit local tourist attractions, and enjoy various amenities and services.

To enhance this part of the customer journey, you can implement various tech solutions. With mobile apps or in-room tablets travelers can access lots of useful information ranging from restaurant recommendations to real-time translations of local languages, facilitating effortless communication with locals.

When it comes to non-tech solutions, simply encouraging staff to engage in meaningful interactions, share local insights, and anticipate guest needs can also transform a simple stay into an unforgettable experience.

The post-trip stage is the conclusion of the trip, when travelers return back home and reflect on their experiences . This is a prime opportunity for you to make sure that your business is remembered fondly, and comes up in customers’ memories as soon as they decide to travel again.

Offering exclusive deals and personalized promotions for future bookings can be particularly effective to enhance the post-trip experience and boost customer loyalty . These tailored offers not only inspire travelers to plan their next journey but also deepen their connection with your brand.

The post-trip stage is also a good opportunity for you to collect feedback to improve your services. Travelers like to be heard, and if they see that their feedback actually has an impact, they’ll get a strong positive impression of your business.

Try and foster a sense of community among past travelers — something even more important now, in the post-COVID era. Creating dedicated online forums or social media groups to find insights, exchange positive and negative reviews, and share customers' experiences creates a supportive and inspiring network of travelers, encouraging them to book their next vacation and try out new routes, destinations, and accommodation.

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A travel customer journey map is a framework used by businesses in the travel industry to understand the entire experience of their customers, from the initial idea of traveling to the end of their trip. It is a visual representation that outlines the various stages a traveler goes through and their interactions with the travel provider at each stage .

This map typically includes all of the stages we have mentioned and highlights touchpoints where travelers interact with a business, like websites, social media, customer service, booking platforms, and physical locations like airports or hotels.

The purpose of a travel customer journey map is to help tourism businesses understand the needs, preferences, and emotions of travelers at each separate stage . By identifying these aspects, you can pinpoint opportunities for improvement in the customer experience.

Enhanced customer experience

Customer journey mapping helps you to delve deep into the experiences and challenges customers face while interacting with your services. Analyzing each step allows you to pinpoint specific difficulties customers encounter , like confusing navigation on a website or lengthy wait times for service.

Addressing these issues not only smoothes out the customer's experience but also enhances overall satisfaction. Happy customers are more likely to develop a lasting loyalty to your brand.

Personalized marketing

Customer journey mapping provides invaluable insights into the behaviors and preferences of your customers at various stages of their interaction with your brand. This allows you to craft marketing messages that will truly resonate at critical decision points.

For example, if a customer feels unsure during the booking stage, you can provide timely and relevant offers or reassurances to encourage a purchase decision. This not only increases the chances of conversions but also enhances the overall customer engagement.

Improved services

Customer journey mapping can uncover rich data about how travelers interact with your offerings and what their preferences might be at different stages, which is crucial for developing new products or refining existing services that more closely align with customer expectations.

This can enable you to offer superior value that attracts new audiences while retaining existing customers, ultimately expanding your reach in the tourism industry.

Optimized sales funnel

Customer journey mapping provides you with a blueprint for refining your sales process. By identifying where potential customers lose interest or have difficulties, you can make targeted improvements that simplify and enhance the process for them.

Removing tiresome checkout procedures or unclear product information can dramatically improve the user experience, increasing the number of complete sales. This not only boosts your efficiency but also contributes significantly to overall revenue growth.

Better allocation of resources

Customer journey mapping enables you to see more clearly which aspects of your operations impact customer satisfaction the most. Whether it is human capital, financial investment, or time, you can allocate resources to areas with the greatest return in terms of customer experience and satisfaction .

Effective resource allocation is crucial for maximizing your operational efficiencies and improving profitability.

Increased customer retention

Providing a seamless and tailored experience across all touchpoints of the customer journey fosters strong and positive relationships with your brand. When customers feel understood and valued from the very first interaction, they are more likely to become repeat buyers .

Increased customer loyalty not only secures a stable revenue stream through repeat bookings but also enhances your reputation, which is invaluable in attracting new customers.

Competitive advantage

Understanding and managing the customer journey maps can distinguish you from your competitors. When you offer uniquely appealing experiences and innovations that resonate with travelers, you set your brand apart .

This can attract a larger customer base, helping you to increase your target market share and establish a strong presence in the travel and tourism industry. All of this is critical for any tourism organization to enjoy long-term success and sustainability.

Streamlined internal processes

By understanding the customer journey, you can boost productivity and promote better collaboration between departments within your travel company .

When marketing, sales, customer service, and IT teams understand their roles in the customer's journey, they can work more effectively to create a unified and efficient experience. This synergy not only improves service delivery but also boosts employee morale.

When each team can see how their daily work fits into the bigger picture, you’ll foster a more proactive and collaborative environment and encourage innovation, with teams more likely to share insights and ideas when they can see the impact on customers.

Improved crisis management

With a detailed journey map, you can better anticipate potential issues in services and implement more effective crisis management strategies . This readiness can minimize negative impacts on the guest experience during unexpected events.

Quicker adjustments to operational plans ensure that travelers’ needs are addressed promptly, while timely communication with customers goes a long way in maintaining trust and satisfaction in unexpected circumstances.

Define your customer personas

The first step in journey mapping is identifying your target audience and creating customer personas — simple profiles of your customer groups, categorized broadly by demographics, preferences, motivations, and behaviors related to travel .

This comprehensive understanding forms the foundation for crafting personalized experiences that resonate with your target audience.

Identify key stages

The next stage of journey mapping is defining the key stages of the travel journey, from initial inspiration and research to travel moments and post-trip reflection.

Don’t forget all of the micro moments of the travel experience itself, and the reflections after it. Each stage of the traveler journey presents unique opportunities for engagement and influence that you should note .

Identify touchpoints

After defining the key stages through journey mapping, it's time to identify the touchpoints for each stage, at which customers interact with your company.

These touchpoints can be physical, like a travel agency or airport, or digital, like your website or social media. Understanding where these interactions occur is crucial for optimizing a customer's experience .

Map out customer actions and emotions

For each touchpoint, map out the actions customers take and the emotions they might experience in the process. You want to understand what drives their decisions at each stage and how they feel during interactions with your brand or other touchpoints.

This journey mapping approach helps you tailor your offerings and communications to meet their needs and preferences.

Identify pain points and opportunities

The next step is to analyze the customer journey map to locate pain points — areas where customers may encounter difficulties or frustrations . This could include long wait times at airports, confusing booking processes, or unexpected travel disruptions.

As a travel provider, you should look for opportunities to enhance the traveler experience and provide value at each stage, like offering personalized recommendations or exclusive perks.

Prioritize improvements

Based on the insights gained from the customer journey mapping exercise, prioritize improvements and initiatives to address pain points and capitalize on opportunities .

This could involve optimizing digital channels, enhancing customer service delivery, streamlining booking processes, or investing in innovative technologies like augmented reality for exceptional experiences.

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Iterate and update

The customer journey map should be an up-to-date and dynamic tool that reflects current customer behaviors, tourism industry trends, and your business objectives.

Regularly review and update the journey map to ensure it remains relevant and effective in guiding your customer experience strategy. You should also gather regular feedback from customers to continuously refine and optimize their journey.

CRM software is designed to manage interactions with current and potential customers, so it plays a crucial role in improving the customer journey.

With features for tracking customer interactions, storing customer data, and analyzing customer behavior, CRMs prove valuable in understanding the customer journey, since they provide insights into touchpoints across various channels . This type of software is specifically tailored to handle interactions with both current and potential customers.

CRM also allows you to deliver personalized experiences to customers based on individual data, making it an indispensable tool for enhancing customer engagement and retention strategies.

Marketing automation software

Tourism marketing automation software helps travel businesses automate repetitive tasks and workflows, so you can focus more on strategic decision-making than mundane activities.

This software can also include features for email marketing, lead management, and campaign tracking, making it a great tool for pre- and post-trip interactions. It can be used to track customer interactions and engagement at different stages of the customer journey, giving you precise data on how customers respond to different marketing strategies and touchpoints, ensuring that you always deliver the right message at the right time.

Analytics and reporting software

Analytics and reporting software provides tools for analyzing data and generating insights into customer behavior, which is invaluable for locating pain points and understanding and interpreting other aspects of a traveler's journey.

These tools offer insights that extend beyond basic interactions, enabling you to see how customers engage with the brand from initial contact through various phases of the customer lifecycle. This helps you to optimize interactions and refine strategies accordingly.

Customer experience management software

CX management software focuses on managing and improving the overall customer experience, making it great for every stage of the journey . It includes tools for gathering customer feedback, measuring customer satisfaction, and identifying areas for improvement, especially when it comes to interacting with your website or mobile app.

These interactions are often the first and most frequent touchpoints for customers, making their optimization crucial for a positive customer experience.

CX management software helps in measuring customer satisfaction through various metrics and indicators, helping you understand how well your business meets or exceeds their expectations. By integrating feedback, satisfaction metrics, and interaction analysis, it not only helps in identifying and resolving pain points but also highlights opportunities to innovate and improve.

Customer journey mapping tools

Journey mapping tools are specifically designed to visualize and analyze the customer journey. They allow you to create visual representations of the customer journey, identify pain points and opportunities for improvement, and collaborate with team members to optimize the customer experience.

Journey mapping tools provide a platform for teams to come together, discuss, and strategize on how best to enhance each step of the customer journey , ensuring that every touchpoint delivers a seamless and satisfying customer experience.

Through comprehensive analysis and team engagement, journey mapping tools play a crucial role in developing a deeper understanding of the customer journey and the ways to improve it.

Multi-channel marketing platforms

Multi-channel marketing platforms enable you to engage with customers across various channels , like email, social media, and mobile. Platforms like these often include features for tracking customer interactions across different marketing channels and personalizing the customer experience based on individual preferences and behaviors.

This tracking is essential for understanding how customers move through different stages of their journey and how they respond to your digital marketing strategy.

Recognizing traveler preferences and finding ways to satisfy customers is especially important for travel businesses hoping to stand out in today’s competitive travel and tourism industry.

By looking at travel customer journeys, we can see that a customer’s experience is often complex, involving multiple touchpoints, emotions, and interactions. Each step, from inspiration to post-trip reflection, provides opportunities to enhance overall satisfaction .

Taking a data-driven approach and looking at customer journey maps is crucial — they provide a clear understanding of how to achieve the balance of excitement, personalization, and a satisfying experience for travelers.

A travel customer journey refers to the entire process from the moment a traveler starts planning their trip to the moment they return home. It covers all the stages of travel, including inspiration, research, booking, experiencing the trip, and reflecting on the experience afterwards.

What are the key stages of a travel customer journey?

The key stages of a typical customer journey typically include inspiration and research, the booking process, pre-trip preparation, the travel experience itself, and the reflection phase. The latter often involves sharing experiences on social media platforms and providing feedback to travel marketers and service providers, influencing others’ travel decisions.

How can travel businesses improve the overall customer journey experience?

Tourism businesses can improve the overall travel customer journey experience by providing personalized recommendations and offers, offering seamless booking and payment processes, providing excellent customer service and support, gathering and acting upon customer feedback, and fostering a sense of community and loyalty among travelers.

Founder & CEO

Alex loves travel and tech and founded Zoftify to help travel companies use technology more effectively. Before this, he worked in tech consulting, where he led international mobile development teams.

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Odysys is now a Cloudbeds company

May 9, 2018

Understanding The Travel Customer Journey to Making a Booking

Technology has revolutionized the way people research, plan, and book their travel experiences. Today’s customers use the internet on almost every stage of their travel journey, from deciding where they want to go to sharing photos from their vacation on social media once their home. To help you understand this process, Google has broken the travel customer journey up into three crucial stages: dreaming, planning, and booking. We think about the travel customer journey when helping our customers build their websites and develop a strong marketing plan. In this post, we’ve outlined the three essential stages of the customer travel journey and highlighted some key marketing activities for each stage.

When viewing this travel customer journey,  we recommend prioritizing your marketing activities by working from the bottom to the top . Check as many of the boxes as you can for the “Let’s Book It” stage before you bother worrying about “Time to Make a Plan” stage, and master that stage before you spend any time on “I Want to Get Away.”

Note: Before you do anything, make sure your website is mobile-friendly. 40% of travel research is done on mobile devices, so if your website isn’t mobile-friendly, you will be missing out on a large chunk of potential guests.

Dreaming: “I Want to Get Away”

The Dream stage happens after the travel bug has bitten but before any concrete decisions have been made. It is that feeling of “I want to get away” or “I’m ready to take that big trip I’ve always dreamt about.” The customer might not know where they want to go or what they want to do once they are there. They just know they want to go.

This stage is heavy on the fantasizing and light on the practicalities. Travelers are open in this stage, looking anywhere and everywhere for that one thing that will inspire them to plan a trip. They are likely doing lots of Googling, conducting countless image or map searches, looking at travel websites like Travel & Leisure or TripAdvisor, and browsing on social media. Customers will be searching for things like “best places to go in the Spring” or “the Best Cities to Visit in 2018” or “the cheapest beach towns in Mexico.” They aren’t yet interested in logistics like flights, transportations, or hotels.

To ensure that you are attracting potential customers during the dream phase:

• Join the innkeeper association or the visitors association in your area . It is their job to market your area as a desirable destination. If you want to get on the radar of potential guests here, leverage your relationships with these associations so that as they market your destination and you are able to capture impressions along the way by being listed in their directory.
• Consider PR & Other Media Coverage. Even more traditional PR methods, like local newspapers or radio stations, have the power to put heads in beds .
• Start or maintain a blog. Having a blog can help bring travelers to your site by showcasing your particular destination and all the great things visitors can do there. Blogs help drive traffic to your site and might inspire visitors to look further once they are there. In addition, you can use your blog to add content to your website about “Best Times of Year to Visit” or “10 Reasons Destination is Great For Honeymoons,” and so on. Download our Odysys Guide to Blogging to become a blogging master.
• Fill your website with high-quality photos of your property and location. Visual content does a lot to capture interest and inspire travelers in the dream stage. The right photos will help potential guests picture themselves lounging on your porch, admiring your ocean views, or relaxing in one of your luxurious rooms.
• Include a video. If you can, provide a video that takes viewers inside your property and gives them a sense of the experience they will have if they choose to stay there. A video isn’t just a slideshow set to music. It is actual filmed footage of your property. It could include a brief interview with you, scenes of guests enjoying their stay, or simply a high-quality montage of everything your property has to offer.
• Have a newsletter signup form on your website. Newsletters are great ways to stay in touch with both past guests and ones who might be interested in the future. If a traveler is in the dreaming or planning stage, they can sign up for your newsletter and you can market to them later on.

Planning: “Time to Make a Plan”

The planning or research stage is the most focused part of the customer travel journey. This is your biggest chance to get on your potential guest’s list. For the customer, reaching the Planning stage is exciting but also a little stressful, because it is when all the practicalities come in, like booking flights and comparing prices.

In the planning phase, customers have decided on a specific place they want to visit and now they are looking for the perfect place to stay while they are there. This means they will be choosing between you and your competitors in the area. In this stage, travelers focus on specifics, such as “hotel with jacuzzi” or “romantic bed & breakfasts in Maine.” They might be searching for a lodging in a specific part of town or rooms that meet their desired price range.

They might look on OTA’s like Expedia or directories like TripAdvisor for the best hotels in a certain destination. They might also consult travel books like Frommers or L onely Planet for their recommendations, but they will likely be doing most their research online and on social media. Again, this means you need to focus on the content of your site.

Be clear about your location, prices, and amenities. Research shows that when browsing on their mobile devices, visitors spend 5% less time on your website than when using other devices. That means that you need to provide all the relevant information in a clear and streamlined fashion. Make sure your homepage is perfectly optimized so visitors can access this information quickly and without too much clicking around.

If there is something that makes your property unique or especially desirable, such as that jacuzzi or those ocean views, highlight it on your website. Make sure your Home Page has a featured photo of said thing and maybe even consider mentioning it in your Title Tags of Meta Descriptions .

In addition to your home page, take a look at these four essential pages on your site and do a little housekeeping: About Your Stay, Things to Do, Policies, and Special Offers & Getaway Deals. Create a perfect special offers page by providing clear & concise information about the deal, showing why that package is extraordinary, and including a Call to Action.

Most important, your Google Business Listing needs to rank well. Local search is an increasingly crucial part of the travel customer journey, so you need to claim & optimize your Google listing and work to keep your ranking high. For more information, downloaded our Innkeeper Cheat Sheet or watch our Local SEO Webinar .

• Market your property on OTAs and directories like TripAdvisor, UniqueInns, or even locally-focused sites like Yelp
• Join your local visitors association and B&B/innkeeper association as well as any relevant local sites or business directories
• Review your photos & content: Are your property’s unique features clearly featured?
• Is your property’s Google business listing optimized and ranking well?
• Is your home page optimized?
• Send monthly emails that offer deals and relevant content to attract potential guests or encourage past guests to come again

Booking “Let’s Book It”

Once customers have made it to the booking stage, they want everything to go smoothly. In this stage, a customer has narrowed down their choices and decided on the location, services, amenities, and atmosphere that is right for them and they are ready to reserve a room. Different age groups want different things out of their accommodations, but all want:

• Complimentary Breakfast
• TV in Guest Room
• Daily Room Cleaning

However, just because a guest decides your property is the right fit doesn’t mean you can get the booking. You also need to remove as much friction as possible from the process:

• Ensure that your Booking Engine os streamlined and well-designed. Users will leave if it takes too many steps to book or get the desired information (like availability and rates for a certain date range.) Don’t lose an important booking just because your booking engine is out of date or isn’t mobile friendly.
• Work to improve your branded search results so you have better ranking & visibility.
• Leverage Google Adwords and retargeting to capture as many bookings at this stage as possible. Using both in tandem can really help close the loop on all the other important work you’ve done in the other stages.

Understanding these three essential stages and the marketing activities for each can help you better target customers at each stage of the journey and as a result, attract more guests to your property. What matters is being present to your customers through every stage of the journey and providing them with the content & information they need to feel truly inspired.

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How to Use the Travel Customer Journey to Drive More Loyalty and Bookings

Chintan Goswami

The travel buying journey starts well before booking

In the dynamic realm of the travel industry, fostering strong brand loyalty is paramount for sustained success. To achieve this, it’s crucial to delve into the intricate journey that a customer goes through, understanding their behaviour and expectations at each stage. 

The primary focus for travel agents and tour operators has traditionally been on the booking stage of the travel lifecycle. After all, bookings drive revenue, making it a logical priority. 

However, what many travel providers overlook is that booking is just one piece of the intricate travel puzzle. The journey of a leisure traveller begins long before the final booking—it starts with inspiration or dreaming. 

Consider this: before an average leisure traveller finalizes a booking, they invest several weeks, and sometimes months, in planning the trip. From determining the budget to choosing a destination, figuring out transportation, selecting accommodations, planning activities, and more, the journey is extensive. 

During this period, travellers conduct countless Google searches, visit numerous websites, read a plethora of blogs and user reviews, and watch countless YouTube videos. It’s a meticulous exploration that culminates in the decisive click on the “book now” button and the input of credit card details.

However, the journey doesn’t conclude with the booking. Post-booking efforts are crucial to ensure a smooth trip, an aspect where travellers often feel a lack of support from travel providers.

Being a traveller today is no easy feat. With so many options available, decision-making becomes a complex task, and the fear of regret looms large.

Moreover, expecting potential customers to land on your website and instantly make a booking is unrealistic. The buying process is a complex journey, and travel providers must be present for consumers at every stage, building confidence and earning their business.

So, let’s take a closer look at the typical stages of the Travel Buyer’s Journey and explore how travel agents and tour operators can actively engage customers throughout this transformative process.

Stages of the travel customer journey and how you can engage customers are every stage

1) Inspiration: Igniting the Dream

The journey commences with a dream, a spark of wanderlust in the traveller’s heart. This is the “Dreaming” phase, where individuals yearn for new horizons and exciting adventures. As travel agents and tour operators, your mission is to ignite inspiration through captivating visuals, compelling stories, and awe-inspiring content.

Create visually stunning and immersive social media campaigns showcasing unique destinations, exclusive experiences, and testimonials from satisfied travellers. Engage in content partnerships with influencers who align with the target audience to amplify the allure of your offerings.

2) Planning: Guiding the Way

Once the seed of inspiration is planted, travelers move into the planning phase. They’ve chosen a destination and are eager to craft their perfect adventure. As a travel agent or tour operator, your role is to become their trusted guide.

Uncover hidden gems, publish detailed itineraries and recommendations, suggest off-the-beaten-path attractions and experiences, provide budgetary guidance. By actively assisting and enriching the planning experience, you can solidify your position as an indispensable part of the traveller’s journey.

3) Booking: Turning Dreams into Reality

The planning stage seamlessly transitions into booking, where dreams evolve into practical decisions. Travellers are now ready to commit to their journey. Ensuring a seamless booking process is paramount.

Implement a user-friendly and secure online booking platform. Offer exclusive deals and use urgency messages to create FOMO. If you are a tour operator, you can provide exclusive perks for direct bookings, such as lower package rates, room upgrades, complimentary excursions, or flexible cancellation policies. Leverage personalized email and WhatsApp campaigns to drive conversions. Employ retargeting strategies through social media ads to gently encourage travellers to complete their bookings. 

Also consider including video testimonials during the checkout process for social proof and trust. This stage is not just about facilitating transactions; it’s about creating an experience that reinforces the traveller’s confidence in their decision.

4) Experiencing: Immersing in the Adventure

As travellers embark on their journey, they enter the experiencing phase. Here, the focus is on creating pre-experience excitement with engaging content, interactive maps, guides, and cultural insights. Travel brands have the opportunity to connect travellers with the local culture, encouraging them to capture and share memorable moments throughout their voyage. 

Develop an immersive pre-travel kit for clients, including health and safety guidelines, packing tips, a curated list of recommendations for restaurants, shopping, and in-depth cultural guides. Foster a sense of community among travellers by organizing virtual meet-and-greet sessions or forums where they can share expectations and tips before departure.

5) Post-Trip Sharing: Keeping the Story Alive

Contrary to popular belief, the journey doesn’t end when travellers return home. They transition into storytellers, sharing their adventures with the world. Travel agents and tour operators can play an active role in fostering engagement even after the trip concludes.

Promote a dedicated post-trip community group/platform where travellers can share photos, exchange stories, and stay connected. Create branded hashtags for social media sharing and run post-trip contests or features to highlight the most inspiring travel stories. Send personalized thank-you notes along with exclusive discounts for future bookings as a gesture of appreciation.

By becoming a part of the traveller’s post-trip narrative, your brand can extend your impact and perpetuate the relationship beyond the immediate travel experience.

As a travel agent or tour operator, you hold the compass to guide travellers through this incredible journey. Understanding each stage of the Travel Customer Journey and actively engaging travellers at every step is the key to creating lasting connections. By doing so, you position yourself not just as a service provider but as a companion on their journey. 

• Craft Compelling Content: Invest in visuals, stories, and content that inspire and resonate with the traveller’s dreams.
• Personalize Guidance: Provide personalized recommendations and itineraries based on individual preferences and interests.
• Streamline Booking Processes: Ensure a seamless and transparent booking process, offering direct booking benefits.
• Enhance Experiences: Create engaging pre-travel content, interactive maps, and cultural insights to enrich the travel experience.
• Foster Post-Trip Engagement: Encourage travellers to share their stories on social media, create a post-trip community, and offer exclusive incentives for future bookings.

The Travel Customer Journey is a dynamic and multifaceted process that extends far beyond the act of booking. By understanding this journey and actively participating in each stage, you can not only create memorable experiences but also position your brand as the go-to choice for travellers seeking personalized and enriching adventures. This way, when they are ready to book, you are among their top choices. 

With over 10 years of experience in marketing and a strong passion for travel, Chintan Goswami is the driving force behind Allura Travel Marketing.

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The traveler journey: how guests find and book your property  

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When it comes to hotel marketing , the secret to driving more bookings is understanding how travelers arrive at your property in the first place. Where do they first find out about your hotel, hostel, inn, B&B, or vacation rental property? What information do they seek when planning a trip, what sites do they visit, and where do they book?

Only once you have answers to these questions will you really know where to find accommodation shoppers, how to entice them to choose your property, and how to set the stage for a positive guest experience.

What is the traveler’s journey?

The traveler’s journey, also called the customer decision journey, is the path people follow when planning a trip, from the inspiration stage right through to the post-stay travel experience. While it’s called a journey, it involves much more than travel; it also includes pre-arrival planning, the booking process, and post-trip sharing.

Understanding the traveler’s journey is critical to hoteliers and hosts because it helps you build your marketing plan , decide where to allocate resources, and make sure to deliver the right messages to the right guests on the right channels at every step. In turn, this helps drive more bookings, incremental revenue, and higher guest satisfaction.

The customer journey: A funnel or a circle?

Traditionally, marketers have used a purchase funnel model to illustrate the customer journey. In this model, the journey starts at the wide end of the funnel when buyers are just beginning the shopping process and considering a broad array of choices. As buyers move through the process, eliminating some and homing in on others, the funnel narrows. At the end of the funnel, the buyer purchases a product, and the journey ends.

But what happens after the purchase? Several years ago, McKinsey & Company put forth an alternative, circular model that encompasses the post-purchase stage and the cyclical nature of purchasing and repurchasing over a customer’s lifetime. This model features a “loyalty loop” that is highly applicable to the hotel business. When guests are happy with their accommodation choice, on their next trip they may skip the dreaming and planning stages and go straight to rebooking the same property.

What is a guest journey map? 

Download the Traveler Journey Infographic :

The five stages of travel

Marketers use a variety of labels to describe the steps of the customer journey. For lodging operators, Google’s Five Stages of Travel can be particularly helpful. Below we explain what happens at each stage and how hotel marketers can connect with travelers and guide their choices at every touchpoint. Today, many of these touchpoints take place on digital channels. With the help of hospitality technology, hotels can automate tasks to save time and ensure opportunities aren’t missed.

Stage 1: Dreaming

In this initial stage, travelers are looking for inspiration. They are open to ideas and exploring a variety of options. They might be considering several destinations and comparing options for transportation, accommodation, and activities in each. In this stage search activity tends to be broad and destination-oriented, favoring platforms like Google, Tripadvisor, destination marketing organization (DMO) sites, and social media.

Marketing strategies for hoteliers and hosts in the Dreaming Stage:

• Make sure your Google Business Profile is accurate. Information from these listings is displayed in popular travel research products like Google Search, Google Hotel Search, and Google Maps and will help a traveler discover your property.
• Revisit your Tripadvisor listing to ensure the content is fresh and current.
• Ensure you’re listed on the websites of local, regional, and national destination marketing organizations or tourism bureaus.
• Your listings on each of these platforms should be complete and up to date with details about your location and amenities, quality photos and videos, and appealing descriptions that answer the questions travelers may have at this stage of the journey.
• Share photos, videos, and other content on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube to promote your destination and local activities. Encourage your guests to do the same.

Stage 2: Planning

In this decision-making stage, travelers narrow down their options, selecting the destination and evaluating options for accommodations and activities. Online travel agencies (OTAs) and review sites are especially popular during this phase for comparing location information, amenities, pricing, and reviews. Travelers also check out hotel websites to find out more.

Marketing strategies for hoteliers and hosts in the Planning Stage:

• Diversify your distribution . The more channels you’re listed on, the better the chances travelers will find you. This includes not only the most popular OTAs but also metasearch engines, the GDS for travel agent bookings and other providers, and, if applicable, alternative accommodation sites like Airbnb, Homeaway, Vrbo, and Hostelworld. Use a channel manager to efficiently manage rates and availability on multiple sites.
• Ensure your OTA listings are complete with descriptions, photos, amenities, and other helpful information such as your wifi availability. The quality of your listings is important because it affects your ranking on OTA sites. The higher your quality score, the greater your visibility. It will also help conversion rates by giving travelers the information they seek.
• Respond to reviews promptly, fix issues that come up in complaints, and incentivize your team to earn five-star reviews. Traveler reviews and ratings also affect OTA rankings and can have a major impact on booking decisions. You want to make it clear that you care about your guests and that your property is equipped to fulfill travelers’ needs.
• Optimize your website. Content should be easy to navigate and SEO-optimized, with all the information site visitors, need to make a booking decision. It should also be mobile-friendly for an optimal user experience as 40% of U.S. travel site visits come from mobile . Make it easy to contact your property and respond quickly to inquiries.
• Focus on visual storytelling. Travel planners tend to scan text quickly and spend more time viewing photos and videos. Feature imagery captures the imagination, gives a sense of place, and inspires emotions like desire, nostalgia, relaxation, productivity, and a sense of fun.
• Make sure your digital marketing strategy includes a paid search campaign to reach travel planners with targeted ads on Google, Facebook, and Instagram.

Stage 3: Booking

Now, the moment of truth. Travelers have narrowed down the options to one property and are ready to make a booking. Will it be your property? During this phase, travelers tend to visit and revisit numerous sites like OTAs, metasearch platforms, and hotel websites to compare pricing and offers before they make their final choice.

Marketing strategies for hoteliers and hosts in the Booking Stage:

• Maintain a dynamic pricing strategy . Your goal is not just to sell rooms but to sell them at the highest rate travelers are willing to pay. This means constantly adjusting rates to reflect changes in market demand, occupancy, and competitor pricing. Revenue management software will help you optimize and automate this process, ensuring you always offer the right rates to the right guests at the right time.
• Play the metasearch game. Platforms like Google Hotel Search, Kayak and Trivago are especially popular at this stage for comparing prices across booking channels. A hotel metasearch marketing strategy will help you maintain rate parity across channels and compete with OTAs for bookings.
• Diversify your offerings. Offer a variety of room types and packages to appeal to a broad range of traveler types, from budget travelers and business travelers to attendees of special events and last-minute bookers. Remember that traveler preferences change over time. 
• Make direct bookings easy. A fast and reliable hotel reservation system with an integrated booking engine will enable travelers to check availability and make a booking in real-time on your website using their credit card or other payment option. Offer a best-rate guarantee and incentives to book directly and limited-time offers to create a sense of urgency to book now.
• Send a confirmation to summarize the details of the guest’s stay using email automation software .

Stage 4: Experiencing

Your work doesn’t end with a booking; in some ways, it’s just beginning. This stage starts with the guest’s arrival and continues through to departure. Here there are opportunities for marketing as well as for enhancing the traveler experience .

Marketing strategies for hoteliers and hosts in the Experiencing Stage:

• Ensure a seamless arrival experience by sending an automated pre-stay email or welcome letter to invite the guest to start planning their stay. Include a special offer to upgrade the room, add breakfast, reserve a table in the dining room, or order an in-room amenity.
• Make the process easy for guests by offering remote check-in services and contactless payment options as well as the option to self-checkout.
• Use a messaging service to keep in touch with guests and send them important notifications during their stay on the channel of their choice, whether by text messaging, Facebook Messenger, or WhatsApp.
• Check in with guests partway through their stay using an in-stay survey solution. This will give you the opportunity to resolve issues while the guest is in-house and find ways to turn a good stay into an unforgettable experience.

Stage 5: Sharing

This stage begins after guests depart and continues through to their next trip when the traveler’s journey recommences. This is the time guests are most likely to share their experience with others through word-of-mouth, on social media, or in online reviews.

Marketing strategies for hoteliers and hosts in the Sharing Stage:

• Send an automated post-stay survey to solicit feedback or ask guests to post an online review on their travel site of choice.
• Invite guests to follow you on Facebook and Instagram and share photos and comments about their stay.
• Invite them to join your loyalty program to take advantage of special perks, rewards, and incentives.
• Send special offers to entice guests back and monthly newsletters to help keep your property top of mind.

And that brings us to the end of the traveler’s journey, although it’s certainly not the end of your relationship with the guest. If you’ve done a great job of communicating with guests and taking care of their needs at every touchpoint, they may bypass the Dreaming and Planning stages and go directly to rebooking your property on their next trip. The more guests who follow this loyalty loop, the more you will save in marketing costs, and the more long-time, loyal guests you will earn.

About Cloudbeds

Cloudbeds is the leading platform redefining the concept of PMS for the hospitality industry, serving tens of thousands of properties in more than 150 countries worldwide. Built from the ground up to be masterfully unified and scalable, the award-winning Cloudbeds Platform brings together built-in and integrated solutions that modernize hotel operations, distribution, guest experience, and data & analytics.

Founded in 2012, Cloudbeds has been named a top PMS, Hotel Management System and Channel Manager (2021-2024) by Hotel Tech Report, World’s Best Hotel PMS Solutions Provider (2022) by World Travel Awards, and recognized in Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500 in 2023. 

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A marketing guide for each stage of the travel customer journey

• Tourism Marketing

As a travel and tourism company, it can sometimes feel like there is always a new marketing tactic you should be trying. We admit our part in this: we encourage you to try out alternative marketing strategies , and this article itself is a round-up of different tactics you should be using!

But as you read through this blog post, don't feel like you have to attempt everything. Instead of spreading your efforts too thin, it's more effective to think about where your focus is best placed.

Perhaps you want more people to be aware of your tours, or you might need to double down on maximising conversions on your website. Here's how to look at your customer journey as a whole and align your marketing efforts for maximum impact.

1. How to think about your customer decision journey

2. How to recognise where you want more results

3. Marketing tactics for each stage of your customer journey

Think about your customer decision journey

Start by considering the core stages of your customer decision journey, or the stages your customer passes through before and after becoming your customer.

In the marketing world, this often consists of Awareness – Consideration – Conversion – Loyalty – Advocacy.

However, we prefer Google's outline of the "micro-moments" that exist in travel :

• I-want-to-get-away moments (dreaming moments)
• Time-to-make-a-plan moments (planning moments)
• Let's-book-it moments (booking moments)
• Can't-wait-to-explore moments (experiencing moments)

Source: How Micro-Moments are Reshaping the Travel Customer Journey  (Think With Google)

We will also add "sharing moments" on the end, or the crucial moment when your guests become brand ambassadors and generate word-of-mouth for you.

So, here's how a customer might experience these five moments with your company...

1. Dreaming

A prospective customer starts dreaming about a trip to your destination and gets inspired by the tours and activities they could find and book.

2. Planning

The customer becomes aware of your company when researching tours and activities in your destination. They ponder how your experience might fit their needs compared to other options on TripAdvisor, and imagine how it will make them feel.

The customer chooses your company! You have been able to convince them to book your tour or activity instead of the competition, and they're now excited for the experience ahead.

4. Experiencing

You provide awesome customer service before, during, and after your tour or activity and exceed your customer's expectations. Because of this, they might well become a repeat customer.

Your customer had such a positive experience that they tell their friends about you. You now have a brand ambassador to provide you with free word of mouth marketing.

Recognise where you want more results

Next, think about where your strengths are and where you want to get more results. Ask yourself:

• Do I want more people to be aware of my tours and activities? (Dreaming)
• Do I lose too many potential customers to competitors? (Planning)
• Do tourists consider my company, but find it too difficult to book and pay and go elsewhere? (Booking)
• Do I want to get more repeat bookings from loyal customers? (Experiencing)
• Do I want to build more word of mouth from happy customers? (Sharing)

Once you know where you could benefit from channeling your efforts, here's a visual of tactics to apply across your customer journey:

Marketing tactics for each stage of your customer journey

1. start more dreaming moments.

Do: Try to be visible in the places where your target customers are

Don't: Attempt to be active on every social network and distribution channel!

Start a blog to increase the chances of your website being found by people searching on Google.

Create a social media strategy   to reach people researching your destination on social media.

Make some SEO tweaks   to your website to get more organic traffic from search engines.

Sell your tours through leading OTAs such as Viator or Musement.

Set aside a small budget for social media advertising , perhaps starting with Facebook.

Give PPC advertising a go  with Google AdWords to target people researching your destination.

Build a partner network   and let agents and partners sell your tours for you.

Generate more word of mouth advertising for your business by building local partnerships.

Have a good stash of print advertising materials, such as brochures and business cards, to hand out to prospective customers and give to your partners to distribute.

2. Create more planning moments

Do: Show the human side of your company to help you stay top-of-mind

Don't: Forget that the most powerful marketing tool is an exceptional customer experience

Answer common queries   about your tour or activity on your website to minimise barriers to booking.

Use your blog to show off the most exciting aspects of your tours and activities   and encourage readers to consider booking .

Improve your rankings on review sites such as TripAdvisor to increase your credibility and the chance of people choosing your company over competitors.

Use email marketing to stay in touch with people who share their email with you (e.g. by downloading a city guide PDF on your website) but haven't yet booked anything.

3. Motivate more booking moments

Do: Use "book now" buttons to make it as easy as possible to book your tours, using software such as TrekkSoft

Don't: Make it overly complex for customers to book, or take them off your site to pay

Have a sales-optimized website that makes it easy for customers to navigate, book, and pay.

Display "book now" buttons   on your website using TrekkSoft and speed up conversions.

Let agents and partners sell your tours   and make it easier for tourists to book with you at other stages of their trip (e.g. during a visit to your local tourism office).

Use the TrekkSoft Point of Sale Desk   to provide your agents with a user-friendly interface to sell your tours and activities on any device.

4. Provide better experiencing moments

Do: Treat every customer like they will review you online to an audience of five million

Don't: Expect customers to be loyal if you didn't provide an outstanding experience on your tour

Schedule automated post-trip emails to thank your guests and provide a positive ending to their time in your destination.

Give voucher and discount codes to your customer and motivate them to book another tour or activity with you.

Take pride in providing exceptional customer service to every guest.

Offer free add-ons to your customers to exceed their expectations and build loyalty.

5. Encourage more sharing moments

Do: Let guests know that reviews contribute a lot to your business's success

Don't: Bribe guests or ask for reviews excessively at the expense of their experience

Remind guests to review you on TripAdvisor  and other review sites by setting up automated post-trip emails.

Get higher quality and more frequent reviews  by ticking off everything on our TripAdvisor Checklist.

Stay in touch with customers through email   by sending an occasional newsletter of company news, milestones, and updates.

Build social media advocacy   by encouraging guests to share their photos on social media and tag your company.

Build your online presence further with our Marketing 101 ebook:

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Rebooting customer experience to bring back the magic of travel

In the 2020 report, “ The travel industry turned upside down ,” McKinsey & Company partnered with Skift Research to document the unprecedented impact that COVID-19 had on the travel sector. 1 Seth Borko, Wouter Geerts, and Haixia Wang, “ The travel industry turned upside down: Insights, analysis, and actions for travel executives ,” September 22, 2021, McKinsey.com. One year later, we find that the travel sector is bouncing back—yet recovery still has a long way to go.

Although 2021 performance has improved considerably, the Skift Recovery Index shows it is still 35 percent below pre-pandemic levels globally. Furthermore, different geographies tell vastly different recovery stories as a result of varying travel restrictions, COVID-19 case counts, and the strength of domestic travel markets. North America shows strong recovery performance, while many Asian countries are showing lower recovery scores as they remain far more cautious in opening their borders (Exhibit 1).

In this report, McKinsey and Skift Research assess the current traveler experience and find mixed signals. While surveys and customer satisfaction rating analyses show many travelers are satisfied with their experiences—some, surprisingly, more so than before COVID-19—a deeper look at the data reveals troubling undercurrents.

Despite high satisfaction ratings, negative sentiment is on the rise. 2 “ US consumer sentiment during the coronavirus crisis, McKinsey survey results ,” May 13, 2021, McKinsey.com. Furthermore, operational capacity is strained, staffing challenges are widespread, airline complaints are up, rental cars are hard to come by, and hotel amenities and services remain substantially pared down.

Given the seeming contradiction between performance and satisfaction, the true situation may simply be that leisure travelers are happy to be on the road again after a year of being stuck at home. As travel volumes increase and business travelers return, there is potential for a wave of customer dissatisfaction—at a time when loyalty is up for grabs.

Will travel players manage to reboot customer experience before travelers’ “honeymoon phase” comes to an end? Or will thinning customer patience shock the system?

Would you like to learn more about our Travel, Logistics & Infrastructure Practice ?

Customer experience is the challenge of the recovery.

Whether it’s more tailored products, greater digital parity with analog services, or faster turnaround, customer expectations of what great customer experience (CX) looks like have shifted significantly. COVID-19 only accelerated these trends, leaving the travel ecosystem in a game of catch-up.

In this changing landscape, travel companies that prioritize CX can gain loyalty, build resilience, and future-proof their businesses.

Yet while travel executives may believe their companies deliver strong CX today, our research indicates there is room for improvement. Common challenges include inconsistency in CX across products, services, and digital; difficulty predicting customers’ sentiment without having to ask them; and time lags in going to market with updates, releases and enhancements.

This report explores the critical role of CX in the travel industry at this pivotal moment in time. Travel executives can ask themselves:

• Do you believe your customer experience is consistently high across product, service and digital? Research shows that you can aim higher.
• Do you know the sentiment of your customers without ever having to ask them? Research shows that you can understand your customers more deeply.
• Do you move as fast today as you did when the pandemic first struck? Research shows that you can move faster.
• Ultimately, how can you be more intentional about unlocking the value of customer experience and bringing back the magic of travel?

Travel companies are still absorbing COVID-19’s financial impact, and investing in CX now may seem too great a burden for many of them. But companies that prioritize CX during a downturn stand to outperform their competition for years to come—as McKinsey research on the 2007–09 downturn has shown. 3 Dago Diedrich, Nicholas Northcote, Tido Röder, and Karolina Sauer-Sidor, “Strategic resilience during the COVID-19 crisis,” March 2, 2021, McKinsey.com. Indeed, wise investment in CX may be key to the industry’s survival, and flourishing, in a post-pandemic world.

There are mixed signals around the current customer experience

As travel volumes are starting to return in many parts of the world, stories have begun to surface about problematic travel experiences. 4 Elaine Glusac, “6 ways to tame airline nightmares,” New York Times , August 24, 2021, nytimes.com; Hannah Sampson, “Tourists in Hawaii are driving U-Hauls because rental cars are so expensive,” Washington Post , May 3, 2021, washingtonpost.com. Has the travel experience in fact gotten worse? The answer is not clear cut as there are mixed signals around the current customer experience.

On the surface, traveler satisfaction does not appear to have declined during the pandemic

Perhaps surprisingly, Skift Research’s Traveler Tracker survey found that more than 80 percent of leisure travelers were satisfied with their Summer 2021 flight and hotel experiences—indeed, nearly half rated their trips as better than those they’d experienced pre-COVID-19 (Exhibit 2). 5 Skift Travel Tracker, July 2021. Similarly, a Travelsify analysis of over 60 million hotel guest reviews found minimal changes in review scores, and a Transparent analysis of vacation rental property ratings found that current scores are comparable to 2019 levels. 6 Travelsify Hotel Brand DNA®, January 2018 to December 2019 and January 2020 to July 2021; Transparent analysis from January to August 2019, 2020 and 2021.

These surprising “satisfaction” rating findings may be the result of leisure travelers simply being happy to be on the road again.

Despite steady satisfaction ratings, negative sentiment is on the rise

As time passes, travelers may become less willing to lower their expectations and accept sub-par service under the guise of “safety.” A sentiment analysis of Tripadvisor reviews from the United States, Europe, and Asia found the emotional intensity of customer reviews increased considerably from 2019 to 2021 (Exhibit 3). Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the pandemic-induced impacts to hotel operations, the shift in sentiment was driven primarily by more negative views on cleanliness, food standards, and service.

Business travelers may not be as understanding as leisure travelers have been

Business travelers typically travel more frequently than leisure travelers, and often have higher expectations; they have long complained at higher rates than leisure travelers, and COVID-19 has only exacerbated this divide. The American Customer Satisfaction Index shows that 38 percent of business passengers complained to the airline, double the rate of leisure travelers. 7 American Customer Satisfaction Index, ACSI Travel Report 2020–2021, April 27, 2021, theacsi.org. Particularly as corporate travel volumes return, companies may see a decline in satisfaction.

There is a potential for a wave of dissatisfied customers at a time when loyalty is up for grabs

In fact, a McKinsey consumer survey found that customers are twice as likely to try new brands and experiences as a result of COVID-19 and 75 percent of US consumers tried a different store, website or brand during the pandemic. 8 “ US consumer sentiment during the coronavirus crisis, McKinsey survey results ,” May 13, 2021, McKinsey.com. This is particularly important in the travel sector with its strong reliance on loyalty programs.

Now is the time for companies who have maintained their satisfaction and performance levels to reprioritize CX and gain an even greater competitive advantage.

A travel boom is looming. But is the industry ready?

Three strategies to transform your customer experience.

This report presents three strategies for travel entities to use to transform CX during the recovery. First, aim higher than your competitors, and aspire to bring back the magic of travel. Second, look forward , using a robust measurement toolkit to understand your customers better. Last, move fast , leveraging a nimble, agile organization to implement insights swiftly).

Aim high—aspire to bring back the magic of travel

The travel industry once set the gold standard for CX, with the offer of memorable journeys and adventures. Travel companies should aspire to bring back the magic of travel by first expanding their view of CX from being human-centered to include digital as well.

Then travel companies can build an emotional connection that exceeds customer expectations. Travel brands must sell the way they make their guests feel : well rested in advance of an important meeting; awestruck at a beautiful destination; recharged after a getaway; appreciated after a heartwarming, personal farewell as they disembark from a plane on the way home. Companies can build these emotional connections by leveraging the science behind delight: While satisfaction is a rational assessment of reality minus expectations; delight is emotional, and is experienced as a result of joy and surprise. 9 Adapted based on research by Chitturi et al. (2008), Kim et al. (2015), Oliver et al. (1997), and Zeithaml et al. (1996). Travel companies can aspire to delight, not just satisfy.

Look forward—understand your customers better

To deliver on ambitious aspirations, travel companies need a deep understanding of their customers. This can be challenging because, as COVID-19 demonstrated, customer needs and expectations are constantly shifting. Travel companies can build a more robust measurement toolkit by leveraging data already at their fingertips. The next frontier of measurement is knowing what your customers want and need without asking.

A more mature toolkit should be holistic and aim to measure the majority of customers by leveraging internal and external data such as social media, booking and mobile systems, and operational systems. Now more than ever, travel companies cannot afford to spend on low-impact interventions, so a toolkit should be prioritized and pinpoint impactful touch points along the end-to-end journey. It should also be predictive and anticipate satisfaction and lifetime value in real time. For instance, companies can apply machine learning to large and dispersed data sets, creating predictive models of sentiment and behavior. Finally, a toolkit should be prescriptive and use data to guide interventions that maximize ROI.

Move fast—implement insights quicker

Real-time insights are only impactful if companies can act on them quickly. As more travel companies invest in measurement toolkits and CX systems, the next frontier lies less in the data and insights, and more in the speed at which that data can be put to use. For many travel companies, COVID-19 was a crash course in agility. As global travel resumes, it is important to harness the crisis-induced momentum through two organizational strategies: breaking down silos to ensure that bureaucracy does not diminish CX, and iterating journeys with customers and employees.

CX is more than a feeling, more than a department, more than a phase in the customer journey. Rather, it is a customer-centric way of doing business, one that requires analytical leadership, cross-functional collaboration, and continuous iteration to deliver great user experience.

Travel companies, with their legacy of strong emotional relationships with consumers, have much to gain from fostering excellent CX, aided by the power of modern digital systems to measure impact and predict behavior. Those who fail to take advantage of this moment may risk falling behind. With changing consumer preferences after COVID-19, CX is an area where businesses can shine: building performance uplift and standing out from the competition—while bringing back the magic of travel for customers.

Vik Krishnan is a partner in McKinsey’s San Francisco office; Kevin Neher is a senior partner in the Denver office; Maurice Obeid is a partner in the New York office; Ellen Scully is a consultant in the Seattle office; and Jules Seeley is a senior partner in the Boston office.

The authors would like to thank Filipa Douma, Jasperina de Vries, Haixia Wang, Seth Borko, and Wouter Geerts for their contributions.

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Mapping the online customer journey for travel companies

Booking a vacation can be a fun and exciting experience. But it can also require a lot of research and planning on the traveler’s part. Who do I want to go with? Where am I going to go? When can I go? How can I get there? What are the best hotel accommodations in the area? It’s a lot to think about…

And what we’re seeing is that these customers want to have more control over the booking and travel process, which has led them to doing so in an online environment. We call these Do-It-Yourself (DIY) travelers . They are well-seasoned and digitally confident consumers who, unfortunately for travel marketers, make understanding the online customer journey that much more challenging. In this blog, we will examine the online customer journey within the travel industry – touching on key factors such as customer personas, the importance of mobile and how user feedback can enhance the journey.

Consider customer personas

Booking through multiple devices and channels

94% of leisure travelers switch between devices as they plan or book a trip -Think with Google

Free White Paper: Improving travel websites and apps with user feedback

A great guide for digital professionals about the importance of user feedback in a digitising travel industry.

So with the ultimate goal of a smooth customer experience, travel companies must first understand what the online journey of their customers looks like:

Steps of the online customer journey

1. Awareness (Dreaming)

2. Consideration (Researching)

3. Intent (Planning)

4. Decision (Booking)

Enhancing the customer journey through online feedback

Although this journey may seem very straightforward, it is almost inevitable that there will be some ‘hiccups’ along the way for some of your customers. And the most effective way of discovering those hiccups and correcting them is through user feedback. So where should digital marketers start? The online journey for customers on travel websites and apps consists of several Moments of Truth (MoTs) . These are moments in which the customer forms an impression about the company; moments such as searching for tickets, search result pages, the actual booking/purchase and after-sales service/changes to a booking. For a smooth on-site or in-app journey, these particular moments must be effortless for the customer. In other words, these are key moments to collect feedback from your visitors. And keep in mind – customers are looking for real-time engagement with travel companies throughout the entire booking process, so meeting their needs in-the-moment is critical to your success as well as their continued loyalty to your brand.

Get started…

Using these deeper insights into how your customers experience your website and mobile app, you will be more than well-equipped to optimise your online funnels. Did you find this article interesting? Check out this article on the use of personalisation in the travel industry and how this can be combined with user feedback for even more extensive insights!

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Online customer feedback volumes per industry, next article, how to improve travel websites and apps with user feedback, related articles.

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Mapping the online customer journey for travel organisations

In this blog we will examine the online customer journey within the travel industry – touching on key factors such as customer personas, the importance of mobile and how user feedback can enhance the journey.

Booking a vacation can be a fun and exciting experience. But it can also require a lot of research and planning on the traveler’s part. Who do I want to go with? Where am I going to go? When can I go? How can I get there? What are the best hotel accommodations in the area? It’s a lot to think about…

And what we’re seeing is that these customers want to have more control over the booking and travel process, which has led them to doing so in an online environment using. We call these  Do-It-Yourself (DIY) travelers . They are well-seasoned and digitally confident consumers who, unfortunately for travel marketers, make understanding the online customer journey that much more challenging. In this blog, we will examine the online customer journey within the travel industry – touching on key factors such as customer personas, the importance of mobile and how user feedback can enhance the journey .

Consider customer personas

Ranging anywhere from business travelers and leisure travelers to families and special needs travelers – there are a wide range of ‘customer personas’ within the travel industry – all have different goals in mind as well as different touchpoints of interest. It is becoming  increasingly more common for travel companies to use these personas as a way of targeting users  for personalised offers and advertisements, and thus increase conversions. However, collecting these profiles can also help marketers understand how a particular profile experiences the online journey.

Booking through multiple devices and channels

So how are these personas booking their trips? Many travelers nowadays are doing their research via multiple devices and channels. The mobile phone, in particular, is on the rise in travel industry.  According to Euromonitor, mobile bookings will account for almost 30% of all online travel bookings in 2017 . This includes bookings via mobile (responsive and adaptive) websites and native apps. It is expected that  this number will jump up to 46% by 2019 . In other words, businesses in the travel industry, if they haven’t already, will need to develop their own mobile strategies if they want optimal mobile user experiences for this influx of mobile users.

94% of leisure travelers switch between devices as they plan or book a trip -Think with Google

So with the ultimate goal of a smooth customer experience, travel companies must first understand what the online journey of their customers looks like:

Steps of the online customer journey

1. Awareness (Dreaming)

This is essentially the stage in which your visitors are discovering their options. Their inspiration comes from things like social media, pictures, ads about the destination, etc. This is a key stage in that this is where companies must get the traveler’s attention.

2. Consideration (Researching)

In this stage, the customer starts looking into specific options. And how are they doing this? According to  Deloitte UK’s Travel Consumer report , search engines are the most popular online planning resource. Starting here they are led to websites such as online travel agencies, airline sites/apps, travel review sites/apps and hotel sites/apps.

3. Intent (Planning)

By now the customer has determined, more or less, where they will be going. In this phase, the comparison process begins. Customers may visit a number of different websites to compare things like pricing and availability as well as the logistics of the trip, including restaurants, popular attractions and upcoming events in the area.

4. Decision (Booking)

The last stage is when the customer actually books the trip. Now that they’ve found the trip they’re looking for, it’s time to secure tickets and reservations.

Enhancing the customer journey through online feedback

Although this journey may seem very straightforward, it is almost inevitable that there will be some ‘hiccups’ along the way for some of your customers. And the most effective way of discovering those hiccups and correcting them is through user feedback. So where should digital marketers start? The online journey for customers on travel websites and apps consists of several  Moments of Truth (MoTs) . These are moments in which the customer forms an impression about the company; moments such as searching for tickets, search result pages, the actual booking/purchase and after-sales service/changes to a booking. For a smooth on-site or in-app journey, these particular moments must be effortless for the customer. In other words, these are key moments to collect feedback from your visitors. And keep in mind –  customers are looking for real-time engagement  with travel companies throughout the entire booking process, so meeting their needs in-the-moment is critical to your success as well as their continued loyalty to your brand.

Author Profile

Co-Founder of Mopinion - All-in-One User Feedback Software for Digital Channels. Customer Feedback Analytics Software for Web, Mobile App and Email. 10 years of Digital Marketing experience, before founding Mopinion Udesh worked for several online agencies. Through Mopinion he advised companies such as BMW, TomTom, Aegon, Scottish Power on how to utilise customer feedback for improving the digital experience.

Customer Feedback, Data-visualisation, Web & Mobile, Digital Customer Experience, NPS, CSat, CES, Closed-Loop-Feedback, Digital Marketing

Previous Experience

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Education & Qualifications

Communication Science, MSc, University of Amsterdam Business Administration, BSc, University of Rotterdam

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Travel customer journey: how automation can help

By Kevin Tjoe — 14 Jun 2023

automation   customer journey mapping   marketing strategies   tourism marketing

A guest blog by coupler.io

Tour and activity companies have been going online for some time. They actively use travel and tour websites as well as mobile apps. Not surprising why that happens. Many travel bookings are made online because it’s convenient for customers to find what they need in a few clicks lying on a couch.

Considering this, operators need to polish their processes. That’s why adopting automation is crucial for success in the tourism and travel industry. It allows to boost employee productivity and improve customer experience. Also, automation is a great addition to the travel customer journey.

Are you wondering why and how to automate the customer journey? This post is for you.

The following article will describe key benefits and use cases of travel customer journey automation.

Understanding customer journeys in the tourism and travel industry

The customer journey describes customers’ interactions with a brand. It includes various stages –  from awareness of your service to post-purchase engagement. 

“Customer journeys” differ from “buyer journeys”. A buyer journey mainly refers to the overall process of arriving at a purchase decision. On the flip side, the customer journey focuses on the overall purchasing experience of the consumer.

Creating a travel customer journey map is essential to visualize the specific stage of the customer life cycle. It offers valuable information regarding the customer needs at each step of the process. Also, it encourages potential customers to move further.

Customer journey mapping also enables you to view your organization from the customer’s perspective, which can help you identify and address any issues or gaps in your current traveler experience.

In the travel and tourism industry, by gaining a deeper understanding of your customers, you can tailor your marketing efforts to their specific needs and improve customer touchpoints across all customer journey stages.

Travel Customer Journey Map Example, Source: Threesides

Stages of the travel customer journey

To effectively attract and engage customers, it is essential to comprehend the various stages of the travel buyer’s journey. The most common classification involves five stages:

Source: Resbook

During the Dream stage , you attract people with your content. Social media channels work well to catch people’s attention with “dream” content. 

Travelers require comprehensive information to address their queries and plan their trips effectively at the Planning stage . So, your website must offer accessible, informative, and actionable content. 

During the Book stage , converting prospects into customers is important. Your website or app must offer user-friendly service, so travelers can purchase, receive all the required help, and be notified about critical nuances.

The Experience stage is next . Here, the focus is on delivering exceptional hospitality. The level of service and communication you provide will impact customer experience and your brand reputation. 

The final stage is the Share stage. During this one, leveraging the opportunity to obtain valuable testimonials is valuable and makes customers return. It is crucial to seek reviews through email follow-ups after booking proactively.

Breaking down the process of the digital marketing customer journey makes it easier to manage and identify the gaps and bottlenecks. 

Key benefits of customer journey automation

The travel and tourism industry should be open to new technologies. Particularly, by using automation, tour and activity businesses  can streamline various processes:

• Bookings and reservations
• Billing, invoicing, and accounting
• Distribution capabilities 
• Customer support
• content production
• and many others

Even small travel agencies, hoteliers, and tour operators can use these technologies to enhance their current flows or create customized automated travel systems. 

Now, let’s discuss some benefits of automation for tourism and travel customer journeys.

It improves employee productivity

The first benefit of automation relates not directly to customers but to employees. Automation impacts employer productivity. And productive teams will keep your customers satisfied. 

Machines perform high-volume and repetitive tasks with greater speed and accuracy, so saving time for employees and minimizing errors. For example, tour operators can use templates to create reservations quickly, with the system calculating net prices based on component costs and adding a margin to produce the selling price. 

Certain tourism and travel software can automate the completion of forms through features such as auto-filling, enabling RPA (Robotic process automation) bots to enter and update passenger name records accurately. RPA software can also automate document checks, verify signatures, and recommend approval or rejection.

In sales, you can automate communication with customers and suppliers via automatic customer journey emails , invoices, reminders, alerts, and more. This allows employees to focus on more meaningful and creative tasks. 

It empowers customer experience

Automation can also improve customer experience. For instance, automation can:

• predict potential disruptions, such as flight delays, weather conditions, carrier information, etc. Travelers and businesses can use this data to plan alternative routes or find available accommodations automatically.
• inform travelers about safety. Real-time government and corporate sources updates can trigger alerts or notifications in case of dangerous conditions. Also, in-app GPS tracking can keep travelers informed about possible difficulties while commuting.
• gather client feedback . Using automated email surveys, you can collect insights for improvement and understand customer needs.

It enhances personalization

We all know that customers prefer personalized experiences that cater to their preferences. 

AI-powered engines can effectively meet these demands by utilizing a range of data sources:

• metadata (location, browser, device, referral source)
• behavioral data (previous bookings, searches, subscriptions, and online activities)
• purchase history 
• social media data (ratings, feedback, shared content, comments, and location tags)

By analyzing this data, you can create user segments and automatically adapt interfaces, layouts, feeds, and other elements to cater to specific needs.

Also, price aggregators must work behind the scenes of an OTA’s website or mobile app to provide visitors with the best tourism and travel product prices. 

A travel booking engine is necessary to connect suppliers through travel APIs, receive relevant information, and display it on the search results page. Booking engines can understand search rules to dictate which products to show and at what price to specific users. As an illustration, the sales team can set up the sending of follow-up emails every few days or upselling emails tailored to a customer’s purchase history a few days before a trip, increasing sales.

It adds flexibility and scalability

Automation can provide scalability, allowing for effective service and excellent customer experiences without expanding the customer support team.

To achieve this, some tourism businesses are implementing technologies like chatbots and virtual agents to alleviate the workload of their agents and improve response times. With such assets, customer requests can be intelligently addressed 24/7.

Additionally, you can use automated customer analytics to optimize pricing and marketing campaigns . You’ll have a space to identify growth opportunities and be more flexible with marketing efforts.

Use cases of travel customer journey automation

We’ve explored the key advantages of automation for your business. It’s time to review five areas where customer journey automation is highly valuable.

Advertising

Using automation solutions, you’ll save a lot of time handling your PPC campaigns and making them appealing to your target audience. Ads automation provides tools to control, manage, and improve your ads campaigns. 

With automation, you can quickly collect keywords and manage biddings. Besides, you can scale the number of ad campaigns effortlessly.

In terms of PPC optimization , you can segment audiences and create personalized offers. You can promote multiple offers and streamline the tracking of discounts and coupon codes you use in your SEM campaigns with the help of coupon management software .

Another thing is campaign analysis. Overviewing performance and spending in ads management tools, you can see what works and what can be improved.

Content-making

Automation allows you to remove bottlenecks related to creating and distributing various types of content. 

Content management solutions can help you moderate your marketing materials. Particularly, you can create templates, improve marketing copies, generate images, and even use AI tools for crafting videos.

Using content planning platforms, travel agencies are able to control:

• content projects (from ideas backlog to performance reporting)
• content production flows (from assigning tasks to editing)
• publishing processes (from a content calendar to posts scheduling)

Eventually, you’ll have a determined plan for content creation and effortless collaboration.

Lastly, automated solutions are a way to optimize conversions of your website or app. Automatic pop-ups, widgets, in-app messages, and landing page optimization are among the use cases you should consider to leverage your content marketing efforts.

Email marketing

Across different industries, email marketing still has the highest ROI of 3,800% on average compared to other channels. 

With the help of automation, your business can leverage this strategy. Email marketing automation can ease their interactions with customers. Personalized and automated emails can motivate customers to move within the tourism and travel customer journey and improve customer retention. 

For instance, tour operators can use automated welcome emails to make a first impression vivid. Also, triggered confirmation and notification emails provide customers with all the necessary information about their orders and trips. 

Source: CloudKettle

Companies engage with customers at the Share stage as well. With post-purchase emails, you can entice guests to return or gather their feedback. Also, you can distribute your content by sending email newsletters with blog articles or news. You should use your customer base to share information about upcoming events or send promotional campaigns.

Different stages of email marketing campaigns are automation friendly. Creating email templates and copies, segmenting your customer lists, scheduling, and sending emails is much more effortless with the help of automation tools.

Social media

Social media can be a powerful tool for the travel industry, and automation can make it even more effective. 

Chatbots can assist customers in searching and booking through social media platforms like Facebook. They can suggest modes of transport, showcase availabilities, provide travel ideas, and update customers on booking status and schedules, customer-specific information, etc. Besides, this channel might be used to share promotions, contests, giveaways, and more.

As for social media activity, using social media monitoring, you can check hashtags and mentions to gather testimonials about your company from various platforms. Offering rewards such as discounts or thank-you gifts to those who promote you can incentivize them to become returning visitors. 

Except for chatbot automation and social media monitoring, you can automatically schedule and publish posts. Regarding social media content, you can streamline creating media and templates with social media management tools.

In the tourism and travel industry, tracking the success of your activities through data analysis is crucial. To make it accurate and effortless, there are data integration, analytics, and visualization solutions. 

Using automated solutions for analysis, you can collect metrics of your campaigns. For instance, by monitoring open rates and clicks for each email, businesses can evaluate its effectiveness. 

In parallel, AI-powered solutions can process vast amounts of data to predict customer behavior and help tailor converting materials. 

Besides, automatically collecting and analyzing reviews on websites and social media can also provide valuable insights into improving your service.

To start with travel customer journey analytics, you can use the in-built functionality of automation platforms or create custom dashboards and reports with third-party tools.

By using automation, you can optimize many aspects of your travel customer journey – from first impressions to post-engagement interactions.

For instance, Rezdy is an online booking system that provides your tour activity business with advanced features to automate the booking process. These features include the likes of real-time availability viewer, automatic communication and updates, and secure integration with various payment gateways.

Of course, crafting a customer journey and implementing the steps mentioned above is possible without automation. But the level of effort, team involvement, frequency of errors, and spending will be higher.

From small tour operators to online travel agencies, automated customer journey management has the potential to revolutionize the travel industry by eliminating inefficiencies and refining workflows.

Written By – Dmytro Zaichenko – Marketing Specialist, Coupler.io

Dmytro Zaichenko is a Marketing Specialist at Coupler.io , an all-in-one data analytics and automation platform. He has over 3 years of experience in digital marketing, particularly in SaaS. Apart from experimenting with marketing tactics, he’s a huge NBA fan.

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Master The Travel Customer Journey

Table of content

Want to know every step of the travel customer journey? Then you’re in the right place! Travel agencies and tour operators need the travel consumer journey map to learn more about their consumers and provide an unforgettable experience for them. In addition, it’s a tool that can provide valuable insights into your future strategy.

But first, let’s see what a customer journey map is:

What is a customer journey map?

The customer journey map represents your consumer’s experience of not knowing you to become a lifelong loyal customer. Each stage has different needs. Mastering each one of these stages is essential if you want to make a sale. With the travel customer journey map, you can improve the customer’s experience.

Importance of the customer journey

The travel customer journey map can help you understand how consumers go through the sales funnel. As a result, it is easier to identify which actions would improve their overall experience. Nowadays, we live in the era of personalization. What does that mean? It means that your customers demand special attention and care, so if you want to increase your bookings, you need to learn how to provide this experience. For example, if a user is in the early stages of their journey, ask them to sign up for a newsletter. Please don’t force them to buy your product! Rushing through the process will probably make them leave. Creating the map and walking in the shoes of your customer will make everything easier.

How and why to research the travel customer journey

Now, let’s see how you can create a customer journey map. Entering inside the mind of the modern human is no easy task. That’s why you need a plan. However, there is no such thing as one size fits all. Why? Because different companies are targeting other groups of people. As a result, you have to understand who your potential customers are, how they behave, and where they are primarily present. After that, you can communicate your message efficiently.

Step by step customer journey

It’s time to gather some data with analytics about your website. A word of caution: the results are not always telling the truth, so don’t assume that many clicks or long dwell times are a good sign! They could indicate that a customer is frustrated.

In the beginning, a potential customer starts dreaming about the destination or experiencing your tours and activities. The individual in this phase is a stranger: not knowing anything about your service, they probably don’t even know it exists. Your goal is to generate human-level connection and interest to the essence of your service (values, mission, purpose, people). What you should do: get them to notice you as they look for inspiration! Your marketing approach: content Marketing through blogs and other forms of content promoted in your social media channels. All you want at this point is to grab their attention. If you don’t grab their attention, someone else’s campaign will.

Researching

At this stage, the customer becomes aware of your company while researching tours and activities in your destination. In addition, they are comparing your offers with others from the most popular sites like Booking.com and TripAdvisor. Your marketing approach: You want to lead them further into the sales cycle. An excellent way to achieve that is by using the surprise & delight formula: give them something they don’t expect and ask for their email in exchange for the content. So here are some content ideas: “How-to” guides for their trip, previous experiences of happy customers, inspiring photos, local tips, videos of your tours and activities, etc.

The customer preferred your company. Well done! You successfully managed to convert a prospective customer. But the journey is not over yet!

You have to make them feel like joining a tribe. Keep customers engaged with emails and other documents that help them enjoy their vacations with peace. Email confirmation is essential after booking. Let them know that they are safe with your customer support.

Post-Travel (Sharing)

You provided excellent customer service before, during, and after your tour or activity that exceeded your customer’s expectations. Because of this, they might well upgrade to beloved loyal customers. Plus, when they are happy about the experience, it is almost sure they will tell the world about it, share photos on social media, and tag your brand. You won a brand ambassador that works for free by producing value with word-of-mouth marketing.

Travel Customer Journey Templates

You will always find different templates related to the customer journey with various steps and critical points. However, all of them are following roughly the same pattern. So check out our favorite ones! By breaking down your customer journey to different stages and learning how to communicate efficiently at every one of them, you can successfully provide an experience that feels personalized, and that will make your company stand out from the rest.

Six more insights travel customers expect from your business:

• To know them: People today expect you to understand what they have in their minds. Inspire them: Tell them about the endless possibilities of travel and technology. Light this fire inside them that wants to explore the world and lead the way.
• Connect them : Travelers are always looking for relevant and quality content. You must provide this opportunity for them.
• “Human Talk”: They want someone to talk to them throughout their journey and guide their experience continuously. But, you won’t see better results if you sound like a robot. Make it human!
• Entertain them : Can you bring the magic that they miss in their everyday lives? This “wow” moment can make them smile! And, if you can make them smile, you can make them buy.
• Care for them : Keep the travelers safe and secure. Support them throughout the trip. A warm sense of protection is essential for a traveler.

The customer journey map is just a map

After the map, you must take action. Make yourself visible! How else will people book your tours? The customer’s experience today is walking hand in hand with technology. People can’t wait anymore for a page to load or for businesses that are not well adapted to the technological changes. Your consumer experience should include actions like the transition from a laptop to mobile and everything in between. Moreover, it is pretty hard to stay in the game without promoting your brand on social media with inspiring photographs and SEO-optimized content. You should dedicate energy and money for optimizing:

• Website appearance and speed
• Email gathering
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Content marketing

Avoid mistakes such as not displaying prices next to your tours and activities or lacking visible buttons. Thankfully, with the existing tools and solutions like Kleesto for your company, it is easy to upgrade your marketing efforts without having to spend all your money on a well-functioning website. Instead, upgrade and automate your travel business so you can reach your full potential.

Evaluate your actions

Meg Elzea, Global Travel Industry Manager at Google, when asked about the journey of the travel customer, revealed three questions they ask themselves to evaluate their efforts: Am I offering an incredible experience? Is my Marketing relevant? Do I measure the right things? Remember what you eventually want to increase. For example, do you want to increase the speed of lead conversion? The probability of lead conversion? The perception of value in your offers?

Did you find this article informative? Do you have any questions about the customer’s journey? We are here to help you become the tour operator of your dreams. Sign up for our 21-day FREE trial!

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How travel marketers can own the customer journey

Planning a trip can be an arduous, thankless task. But marketers have new tools and tactics in their arsenal that can make the experience better. By combining data with digital audience solutions, savvy travel marketers can better connect with travelers—and drive more bookings.

Exciting as it may seem, trip planning can be a chore. Stress runs unchecked: 69% of leisure travelers worry they're not finding the best price or making the best decision while booking a trip. 1 To put that in perspective, travelers are more worried about not finding the best price or making the best possible vacation decision than they are about their financial investments, home improvements, or electronics purchases. 2

Compounding this anxiety is the amount of time many leisure travelers allow to plan—and obsess over—trips. Twenty-six percent decide on a vacation destination three to five months before departure, while 19% decide more than six months out. 3 This presents a challenge for marketers trying to differentiate their brands and drive consideration throughout the travel shopping journey.

Think with Google

Source: Google/Phocuswright, “Leisure Traveler” study, base: U.S. leisure travelers, n=930, Oct. 2015.

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With digital, though, brands gain unparalleled insight into their target audience. Marketers can go beyond traditional demographic targeting and look more closely at travelers’ intentions. Whether it’s videos viewed, searches, or content engaged with across the web, these activities send strong signals about whether a traveler could become a customer.

These audience-driven strategies represent an exciting opportunity, but only if brands are smart about how they integrate their customer data with automated audience solutions. Then, they can unlock personalization opportunities at scale—and set themselves on a path to growth.

Here are three strategies that are proven to find—and convert—travelers on the hunt:

1. Examine lifetime value (LTV) to know who your best customers are

A millennial leisure traveler who spends lavishly at a hotel once a year may not be as valuable as a business traveler who spends less on a single trip but returns again and again. Prioritize the right audience by consolidating your company’s first-party data and segmenting customers by the value they bring.

Even if your company doesn’t have reams of cumulative data on hand, you can still glean a snapshot of your most valuable customers. Segmenting across category lines (e.g., product type, behaviors, loyalty) for just the past year will allow you to confidently estimate LTV for many user groups.

By learning the online behaviors of your desired audience—as well as how similar audiences engage with online content—you can refine your digital strategy.

2. Engage high-value customers with timely ads

Serving the right ad at the right time is the goal of all digital marketers, but identifying those moments can often feel like hunt-and-peck guesswork.

Starwood Hotels and Resorts found a way to make this easier and more efficient. By utilizing remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA), the brand was able to use signals such as date-range inputs to customize follow-up messaging in search for users who had visited its website. With this approach, Starwood drove 240% higher conversion rates and 160% return on investment.

3. Optimize for the entire customer journey

By looking beyond the last-click conversion, brands can better understand how travelers research throughout the customer journey.

La Quinta revolutionized its audience targeting with a strategy that utilized data-driven attribution and Smart Bidding in Google Ads. 4 This approach allowed La Quinta to determine which keywords were more profitable in the context of the full customer journey. Having learned which generic keywords were most influential, La Quinta can now better personalize its messages.

The brand’s new audience strategy yielded a 131% higher click-through rate (CTR) and 27% higher conversion rate.

The successes from Starwood and La Quinta are examples of an exciting shift in digital marketing: Marrying consumer data with automated audience-growth strategies can unlock tremendous opportunities to customize messages at scale.

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Travel trends 2016: data reveals hot spots and new consumer insights, travel micro-moments guide: how to be there and be useful for travelers, travel trends: 4 mobile moments changing the consumer journey, 3 ways cruise line marketers can win with digital, 3 ways the digital traveler is changing — and 3 ways marketers can keep up, sources (2).

1,2,3 Google/Phocuswright, “Leisure Traveler” study, base: U.S. leisure travelers, n=930, Oct. 2015. 4  Google Adwords is now Google Ads. Learn about  our new brands .

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Re-drawing the map​

• Evelyn Zhang

Senior Manager Product Proposition-OTA & Meta, Travelport

• November 6, 2020
• Agencies , Recovery

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How has the traveler journey changed from pre-COVID-19 to where we are today — and what does this mean for online travel agencies? Here I’m outlining some of the key differences that are emerging.

Understanding the traveler journey

Regardless of the climate for travel, there are typically six stages to any traveler journey: inspiration, shopping, booking, pre-trip, in-trip, and post-trip. At every step, travelers will engage with travel brands for a range of services, and experience hundreds of touchpoints, on a variety of devices. For example, a typical (pre-pandemic) accommodation-purchase journey has 45 touchpoints alone — and that’s just looking for somewhere to stay!

Read more about Travelport’s Hotel Stay Safe Feature here.

Online travel agencies (OTAs) can influence travelers’ experiences and become invaluable travel partners to customers at every step of the journey. This goes far beyond simply converting lookers to bookers — this is a chance to open up new revenue streams at multiple touchpoints.

By taking a full view of the traveler journey and creating your own journey map, you will see immense potential to grow conversions at every step. And the term ‘conversions’ doesn’t just mean bookings; there are specific goals your OTA can achieve at each stage of the journey, for example: converting page views to trip searches, searches to bookings, bookings to ancillary attachments, and so on.

What’s changed?

First, let’s take a look at this sample leisure traveler journey pre-COVID-19.

Now, let’s compare that to the customer journey in the era of COVID-19.

By comparing these two charts,  we can see a number of changes taking place across each stage:

Inspiration  Travelers are now naturally much more concerned with knowing what safety measures will be in place across all touchpoints of their journey. This means that while Inspiration is still an important stage of their journey, in the near- to mid-term we can expect assurance to be a deciding emotional factor as well.

Shopping  Key traveler concerns, such as getting the best deal and making the most of their break, haven’t gone away. But there are new ones on the list; from ‘how safe will I be?’, to ‘can I get my money back if I have to cancel?’. We know from our recent research that this is an extremely influential factor in decision-making.

Booking  The travel environment remains highly volatile, with lockdowns, quarantines and cancellations happening at a moment’s notice. As a result, customers are more concerned now about how insulated they are from financial loss, putting a renewed focus on booking flexibility and insurance validity.

Pre-trip  As COVID-19 lockdowns fluctuate, travelers are closely monitoring the situation in destinations. This is creating more demand for pre-trip guidance and information on insurance. Customers will feel reassured at this stage by flexibility and generous cancellation/refund policies, while agencies are likely to experience a significant increase in itinerary adjustments than in the past.

In-trip  There is still a wealth of decisions to make in-trip, including taking tours, booking restaurants or experiences, shopping, onward travel, and more. What has changed is that there is more demand from travelers for information while at their destination, i.e. on local regulations and restrictions.

Post-trip  With the pool of potential travelers smaller than it usually is, OTAs will need to use every tool at their disposal to develop a loyal brand following and increase purchase frequency. Valuable sources of information are customer feedback and reviews, so they can better understand their preferences and tailor future deals accordingly.

Helping your business recover

You can find a range of support and information on COVID-19 and recovery on our  resource hub.

Mapping the Hotel Guest Journey From A-Z: A Complete Guide

Think about the last time you purchased something online. Buying an experience or booking a hotel involves undergoing the same mental and emotional process on the traveler’s part, just as making any other purchase decision.

This cognitive buying process is what leads the guests to book a particular destination and visualize exactly the kind of experience they had always wanted.

Thus, for every hotelier, it is important to identify, anticipate, and satisfy the guests’ requirements to enhance the overall guest experience and drive key business metrics.

It also allows the hotels to build a long-lasting relationship with their guests, who might develop a favorable disposition towards the property and the service rendered, thereby making it a point to return to it again and again, giving impetus to the notion of guest loyalty.

One way of achieving this all is to put yourself in the shoes of your customers, and this you can do by mapping the hotel guest journey from booking to departure.

Visualizing the Journey From a Typical Customer Viewpoint

In hospitality industry customer journey is a lot more important. Thus, mapping the hotel guest journey is one way of gaining customers’ perspective on why and how travelers book a stay for themselves. Be it a small hotel customer journey or big resort guest's, this process involves charting and analyzing the various phases your guests go through making sure they are investing their money in the right place.

Your customer journey map or experience map is also an excellent way of engaging and interacting with guests. Every stage has the potential to allow a hotelier to woo their guests with an exceptional service by using the right products and the right tools.

To top it all off, the level of engagement and communication with the guests heightens at each level of progress made by the guests in their respective journeys and allows the hotels to win their trust. Thus evaluating your hotel business along the customer journey is the best way of using this strategic tool. A vital part of hotel marketing, analyzing the customer journey is a must.

Benefits of Mapping the Guest Journey - the ROI

Based on Aberdeen Group research published in its “Customer Journey Mapping: Lead The Way To Advocacy”, some of the specific year-over-year (YoY) growth that companies with a customer journey management program enjoy over those that don’t include:

➝ Greater return on marketing investment: A focus on the customer’s journey gets over 50% greater return on marketing investments than for those that don’t.

➝ More positive social media mentions : A focus on the customer journey typically means a better customer experience. What does this mean? Nearly 25% more positive social media mentions.

➝ Greater revenue from customer referrals: Better customer experience also drives more positive word of mouth, driving more than 2.5x greater revenue from customer referrals.

➝ Faster average sales cycles: companies who manage journeys enjoy more than 13 times greater cross-sell and upsell revenue.

➝ Greater cross-sell and upsell revenue: cross-sell and upsell revenue over 55% greater than your competition, this stat alone should be compelling enough to get you started.

Here a few other benefits of mapping the hotel guest journey and the overall importance of customer journey mapping in the hotel industry:

• It allows insights and a deep probe into the customer psychology to understand things from their perspective.

• It helps identify customer’s problems and confusion by using the right tools and products at every stage and in turn, enhances the guest experience.

• It helps drive important business metrics and enables hotels to provide a customer-centric service.

• It helps to align the strategic and operational measures at each stage, right from the booking until check-out to make sure that hotels are not lagging in fulfilling their guests’ requests.

• It helps to personalize the guest experience.

• In a way, it digitizes the guest’s journey and enables hotels to make prior arrangements.

• It helps know where your target audience and bookings are coming from, making sure that your property is represented well from a review content perspective across various channels.

• Encourages the customers to view you as a brand with which they can strike a long-lasting bond.

• Helps to trace the path your guests took to reach you and allows the hotels to make the remaining journey better.

To simplify the concept of mapping the hotel guest journey, we have broken it down into several stages, providing you the ultimate guide to guest experience mapping, described in detail and supplemented with useful information on the right tools that can help a hotel achieve success at every point of contact with its guests:,

1. Travel Inspiration & Research

(I want to travel. Where Do I Go/Stay?)

As you sit to analyze the guest’s journey, start with the impulse that drives them to book a stay in the first place! The answer is obvious- travel. The urge to travel acts as a driving force behind the customer’s experience purchase.

The inspiration to travel derives from various sources. Let us break this down further in the Inspiration section:

Inspiration Stage: Factors influencing customers to undertake travel:

1. Social media plays a significant role in this regard, luring customers with gripping, illustrative, phenomenal, and highly-visual travel blogs, write-ups, videos, slideshows, travelogues, etc.

2. Thanks to a large number of travel bloggers who have been actively showcasing their own travel experiences through YouTube videos, interviews, travelogues, and explainer videos giving out useful tips on popular destinations, things to do there, what to pack, what to expect, etc.

3. Even popular destinations and hotels in these regions are not lagging behind in this entire casting-the-spell game. They are bewitching the customers with gripping content, things to do, activities & sightseeing for an exciting leisure trip.

4. Travel advertisements generated in abundance on social media showcasing breathtaking destinations and luxurious properties offering ‘4 Days-5 Nights Packages’ have the power to grab consumers' attention. Platforms like Facebook and Instagram are extremely well-known for generating personalized advertisements based on individual preferences and clicks on related pages and links.

5. Even the 'word of mouth' has the power to prod someone to undertake travel. In this connection, travel inspiration received from a friend, relative, or colleague who has just returned from a vacation can also instill within the listener (your potential customer) the inspiration to travel.

6. Also, the testimonials and guest reviews on various social media platforms and hotel websites inspire a reading traveler to give it a go

Useful tools for the Travelers at the Inspiration Stage:

☛ Social Media (Instagram, Facebook, etc.) ☛ Google and other major reviews sites such as TripAdvisor ☛ Advertisements in newspapers, travel magazines, blogs, etc. ☛ Word of mouth

Useful tools for the Hotels at the Inspiration Stage:

☛ Effective management of Google and other review sites by updating it with great pictures, timely responses to engage better with the customers, etc. ☛ Social media management ☛ Modern, fast website preferably with fresh testimonials from guests ☛ Press communication

Next, at the Research Stage, the future traveler has shortlisted a few destinations based on their personal choices and options. However, they have not yet arrived at a concrete decision.

At this stage, they are frantically depending on the internet to browse a plethora of options in terms of destinations and budget before giving a final say. Here, it is important to ensure your position and ranking over the OTAs as “76 percent of travelers are willing to pay more for a hotel that has positive ratings and reviews than one without.”

However, the potential guest is not entirely clueless. They still have a handful of resources, to begin with. For instance, they already have a few destinations in mind, the time at which they want to travel, things they would like to do there, time slots available for them, etc.

What Exactly Happens Here:

1. The future traveler budgets the trip and evaluates options to book the right experience.

2. They already have imagined themselves on that trip to narrow down their choices.

3. Feeds on OTA Reviews and probes into social media to get the possible authentic or majority feedback along with some additional information about the destination.

4. Again, a future traveler can also be a part of various travel forums and communities online. They might just look into them for multiple perspectives and other travel-related information.

5. The best place to shape the monetary aspect of the trip is the OTA platforms. Having said that, they rely heavily on the OTAs to compare and evaluate the overall budget for the trip.

6. Simultaneously, they are checking the hotel website for price and additional information aided by WebChat to help answer travel-related queries.

Useful tools for the Travelers at the Research Stage:

☛ Reviews & Feedback ☛ OTAs ☛ Social Media ☛ Forums and Communities ☛ Comparison sites ☛ Guides, travelogues, advertisements ☛ Hotel Website with WebChat

Useful tools for the Hotels at the Research Stage:

☛ Maintaining solid reviews on OTAs and Google ☛ Engaging with guests on OTAs and other review sites. ☛ Excellent Review Management across all channels to understand customer sentiments for making the positive changes ☛ Updated hotel website and fully-functional WebChat to assist potential customers and drive bookings ☛ Managing Social Media ☛ Digital Advertising

(Wish me luck! I am making a purchase)

At this stage, things have reached more to less to their conclusion. The traveler has chosen his/her preferred destination and time of travel. Greater attention is paid to the price comparison ratio to book the right or suitable accommodation. Although this stage could be considered an offshoot of the research stage, it still is distinct in its significance as here the traveler is more focused on price comparison and does so meticulously to finalize things for themselves.

Things to Expect at this Stage:

1. A bit more seriousness and focus on the part of the future traveler when comparing price or finding the right value ratio.

2. A split between the OTA sites and hotels in the light of the price comparison or whether to book direct (hotel website) or through the OTAs (Booking.com, Airbnb, Expedia, or region-specific.)

3. The customer is looking for options based on preferences (location, recommendations, budget, listing, ranking, ideal time to travel, etc.)

4. The future traveler is looking for the best deal.

5. Possible pre-booking questions are addressed to the hotel staff through various modes. For instance, a hotel can have a visitor asking them over WebChat some questions like these:

“Is the shuttle service available?”

“Hi, I am looking to book a room for a family of 5 for the coming Monday. So, which room would be suitable for us?”

“Can I check-in early?”

Useful tools for the Travelers at the Booking Stage:

• ☛ OTAs, Google, TripAdvisor
• ☛ Hotel Website
• ☛ WebChat /LiveChat

Useful tools for the Hotels at the Booking Stage:

☛ A good ranking on the OTAs, review sites and Google ☛ Engaging with guests on the OTAs and other review sites. ☛ Modern, easy to use, mobile-optimized Hotel Website ☛ Booking engines and channel managers that offers direct rate comparison on Hotel Website ☛ WebChat is designed for hotels to engage and convert website visitors.; a feature for the website to answer customers’ queries. ☛ The ability to upsell through the relevant pre-booking questions/queries

3. Pre-Arrival & Check-In

(Ready. Set. Go)

This is the preparation time where the guests will be gearing up for their upcoming trip after having received the booking confirmation from your end. This will enable them to pack accordingly, refine their itinerary, and gather the necessary documents with which they will be flying.

This stage has a lot of potential. Just imagine that even before meeting the guest you can sweep them off their feet with your distant service. You can also make their stay relevant and personalized.

What do Guests Want at this Stage?

1. Booking confirmation from the hotel.

2. Both the necessary and additional details to make their stay easier- check-in time, online check-in facility (if any), itinerary, weather details, things to do and pack, amenities offered, hotel address, special services, details regarding the shuttle or transport service that the hotel offers, the facility of leaving their baggage with the hotel while they explore the city, local recommendations, etc.

3. Preferably, a personalized micro page or pre-arrival email wherein is listed all the relevant and useful information regarding their upcoming stay with the hotel, almost like literally helping the guests with “this is what you will need.”

4. A reminder for their upcoming reservation, preferably a day before their scheduled arrival.

5. Special services, if any to be booked at the very outset.

6. Instant and useful replies to some more travel-related queries through WebChat or SMS, WhatsApp ( Guest Messagin g), or guest self-service portal.

7. As the world moves more into the messaging realm, you can use direct messaging to announce upcoming food specials, or let guests know that their room is ready early—these little alerts can be customized accordingly to ease hectic travel situations.

A few important sample messages at the Pre-Arrival Stage:

a. Booking Confirmation Message

“Hi, *name*. Thank you for choosing us. We would like to confirm your reservation at *hotel name* between *arrival date* and *departure date*. For more details on your booking, please visit *the URL.* We hope you will enjoy your stay and we look forward to welcoming you!”

b. Reminder Message

“Hi, *name.* Trust you’re doing well. This is a gentle reminder regarding your reservation at *hotel name* between *arrival date* and *departure date.* For more upgrades and special services, you can contact us by visiting *the URL.* We are looking forward to your arrival!”

c. Brochure/Guide Over the Phone Message

“Hi, *name.* We are looking forward to your stay. Want to know us better? Click on the *URL* to learn more about the amenities, request special service, learn about the area, and more.”

  • Check-In

(Is anybody here? .... Now begins my first physical experience with the hotel)

As the on-arrival marks the first physical contact or interaction that the guest has with you, it allows you every opportunity to win their trust. To sum it up, this phase begins the moment a guest arrives (check-in) at your property.

Even though the customer journey with you had begun at the pre-booking level, on-arrival marks the beginning of their physical journey and interaction with you. Although a bad on-arrival experience has nothing to do with your hotel in general, it still has a lot to do with guest psychology and perspective. Make sure that your hotel has made all the preparations required to give your guests a warm welcome.

For a beautiful on-arrival/check-in experience

1. Make sure that the guests reach your property hassle-free.

2. Make sure that your guests can find you. So provide your address, details about the area, shuttle or transport details, etc.

3. Make sure that the guests do not have to wait past their check-in time. Coordinate well with your housekeeping staff to ensure that the rooms are ready.

4. If possible, accord your guests the option of self or a quick check-in.

5. Provide a warm welcome to your guests.

You can employ a lot of gestures here such as greeting the guests with a smile, striking an amicable conversation to get more useful information on what they are looking for like “are you on a business or leisure trip?” “How did you find us?” etc., providing warm delights along the way like a complimentary on-arrival drink, free mints, a plate of appetizers, free wine, and cheese hour, etc.

6. Once your guests’ check-in, they will have a lot of other stay-related questions like breakfast timings, WiFi password, nearby restaurant recommendations, special services, gym & pool timings, etc. Why not answer these questions beforehand?

You can use Email or Guest Messaging to make sure that all the information upon check-in reaches the guests on their phones along with the house rules for easy access from time to time whenever a query arises.

7. Also at the check-in, you can request the guests to use Guest Messaging to allow a flawless and instant communication right from the comfort of their rooms.

Be it in posing any stay-related questions, asking directions and recommendations, or requesting things seamlessly from their rooms, Guest Messaging can be a great tool. Powering your messaging with PMS integration is one of the best ways to keep track of what messages to send at various touchpoints in the hotel guest journey.

A few important sample messages at the Check-in/On-Arrival Stage:

a. Welcome Text

👋 “Hi, *name* Welcome to *hotel name.* Your WiFi is *HappyGuest.* Here is a personalized welcome page that has all the relevant details about your stay, right from the shuttle to nearby recommendations. Please visit *the URL* Breakfast is served from 6:30 to 9:30 AM. We also have Happy Hours for our guests every day from 5 pm-10 pm🍷 Feel free to text us here if you have any questions. Enjoy your stay”

b. Complimentary Facilities Message

“Welcome to the *hotel name.* Once you’re settled, head over to the lounge on the second floor for a complimentary glass of wine and Hors d’oeuvre” Hope you will have a great stay”🎉

Useful tools for the Guests at the Pre-Arrival & Check-In Stage:

☛ Communication channels ☛ Guest self-service portal ☛ Brochure or activity guide or Personalized MicroPage that has Welcome guide ☛ Booking confirmation email

Useful tools for the Hotels at the Pre-Arrival & Check-In Stage:

☛ Pre-arrival email ☛ Communication tools like WebChat , Email, and Guest Messaging to answer questions with ease ☛ Guest self-service portal ☛ Upselling ☛ Personalized micro page or questionnaires ☛ Brochure or helpful activity guide ☛ PMS Integration to automate communication

4. During the Stay

(So far, so good)

This stage is all about the in-house experience for a guest. To sum it up, this phase begins from when the guest arrives (check-in) and what they do during their stay (mid-stay) right up until they bid you goodbye (check-out).

This phase has a great significance as it allows a possible service recovery when guests might start sharing their reviews online. So a mid-stay checking on how the stay is going will allow you to identify the problem areas beforehand and resolve these issues before they assume the form of the negative guest experience.

For instance,

👋 “Hi, *Jennifer.* We hope that you are doing well. How is your stay so far? Please let us know if we can assist with anything during your stay. Take care”

Things to Pay Attention to at this Stage:

1. Once after the on-arrival phase, the guest settles in, it is imperative to send them all the house rules with Wi-Fi password, breakfast timings, pool & gym timings, local tips & recommendations, special services, etc

2. Use Guest Messaging strategically to ask the guests mid-stay about their experience so far to know if there’s anything they require in particular. Again, at this stage, you can very wisely remind them about the benefit of requesting things seamlessly from their rooms and about your special services.

“Hi, *name.* Thank you for choosing to stay with us. We hope that you are doing well. If there’s a special service that you require, please feel free to drop us a text.”

3. You can also identify the passions and preferences of your guests and offer them special services based on the same.

4. Encourage the guests to use Guest Messaging to ask for a late check-out, stay extension, room upgrade, special service, etc.

Useful tools for the Guests at the Mid-Stay Stage:

☛ Guest Messaging ☛ Social Media to share their experiences on. ☛ Guest self-service portal

Useful tools for the Hotels at the Mid-Stay Stage:

☛ Communication mode ( Guest Messaging ) ☛ Personalized services ☛ Upselling tools

5. Check-Out & Post Stay

(Nostalgia strikes! Time to bid goodbye)

This is the last stage in the hotel guest journey where your guest will finally bid you goodbye. However, this is a crucial stage as it is here that the guests will review their stay with you based on their overall experience and factors like cleanliness, amenities, location, staff service, food & drinks, etc. The task of the hotel at this stage is to provide maximum means to the guests where they can leave and share their reviews.

Things to Do at this Stage:

1. Providing a streamlined checkout process. If the guests do not get a late checkout and just want permission to store their baggage with you while they explore the city, it will be great if you could encourage that. This small gesture can go a long way in influencing the guest’s perspective in a positive way.

2. Make it easier for the guests to provide you direct feedback or review. It can be through email, WhatsApp, sharing Google & TripAdvisor review interface links, scanning QR codes, providing a review card with the relevant link, etc.at the check-out. Easy means will get you more reviews and more reviews will drive the review volume and score up.

“ Thank you for choosing to stay with us. We hope you had a wonderful stay. Your bill *reference ID* has been paid in full. We would be happy if you could leave us a review on *URL.* We look forward to the pleasure of hosting you once more”

3. Remember that more reviews mean more bookings, high popularity ranking on platforms like TripAdvisor and a positive influence on pricing.

• Post Stay

(Time to work on feedback and forging an ever-lasting bond)

This is when the guests return from their trips and reminisce about their experience with you (be it good or bad). Based on what they are experiencing, they would resort to the internet to share their reviews and thoughts on various platforms. The word of mouth comes into play here as the guests are highly likely to share their experience with their friends and relatives.

A guest with a positive experience is likely to mention your hotel to their close friends and who knows, they might even become a promoter by sharing their thoughts on various online platforms!

Things to Consider at this Stage:

1. Sending a sweet reminder to the guests a few days after check-out to give a review on OTAs if it’s not done already:

👋 “Hi, *Jennifer.* Thank you for choosing to stay with us. We hope you had a wonderful stay. We’d really appreciate if you just take a moment to share your experience with us:* the link.* We look forward to the pleasure of hosting you again. Safe travels. {Name}, General Manager”

2. Engaging with guests on Google and various other OTA platforms through timely responses to their reviews.

3. You can consider post-stay targeted marketing based on customer segments if the guests have opted in for future updates and further communication.

[Note: these messages should only be sent to the guests who have opted-in for receiving it as too many messages, especially the promotional ones might be a little too overwhelming for the guests.]

“We miss you, Jennifer! We are giving out a special discount of 25% on the second night of stay. Call us on *number* to book. Offer expires in 30 days.”

Useful tools for the Guests at the Check-Out/Post Stay Stage:

☛ A simple and quick way to leave Feedback & Review ☛ Social Media ☛ Communication Channels ☛ Word of mouth

Useful tools for the Hotels at the Check-Out/Post Stay Stage:

☛ Collecting feedback easily through survey via email or text message ☛ Collecting reviews automatically for Google, TripAdvisor, and OTAs ☛ Questionnaires, quick surveys, interviews ☛ Managing reviews across platforms ☛ Learning from guests’ feedback with a 360° view on each guest’s journey to better incorporate feedback ☛ Responding to guests comments professionally and promptly ☛ Marketing emails

A Quick Recapitulation:

Powering both the independent and award-winning boutique hotels with a next-generation review solution, GuestTouch, allows you to engage with your guests throughout their journey and drive important business metrics.

It integrates with your PMS and provides an all-in-one solution that aids in interacting with your customers at various touch points, getting more reviews easily, improving your scores, analyzing reviews, responding to them across all sites, and influencing customers’ booking decisions, automatically. See a free demo?

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"Explore the world with ease! Rhlaty makes booking flights a breeze, offering seamless experiences and unbeatable deals. Download now and embark on your next adventure!" Welcome to Rhlaty, your ultimate travel companion for seamless flight booking experiences! Whether you're planning a spontaneous getaway or a meticulously organized journey, Rhlaty empowers you to explore the world with ease. With Rhlaty, booking your flight tickets becomes a breeze. Our intuitive interface allows you to effortlessly search for flights, compare prices, and select the perfect itinerary to suit your travel needs. Say goodbye to endless scrolling and complicated booking processes – Rhlaty streamlines the entire journey from start to finish. **Key Features**: - Effortless Flight Booking: Find and book flights quickly with our user-friendly interface. - Comprehensive Search: Explore a wide range of flight options to discover the best deals. - Price Comparison: Compare prices from various airlines to ensure you get the most value for your money. - Secure Transactions: Rest assured with our secure payment gateway for hassle-free transactions. - Personalized Experience: Save your preferences and frequent flyer details for a tailored booking experience. - 24/7 Customer Support: Need assistance? Our dedicated support team is available round the clock to assist you. Whether you're jet-setting for business or pleasure, Rhlaty is your trusted companion for all your travel needs. Download the app now and embark on your next adventure with confidence!

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Automatic Refunds and No More Hidden Fees: D.O.T. Sets New Rules for Airlines

The Transportation Department issued new requirements on refunds when flights are canceled or delayed and on revealing “junk” fees before booking. Here’s what passengers can expect.

By Christine Chung

The Transportation Department on Wednesday announced new rules taking aim at two of the most difficult and annoying issues in air travel: obtaining refunds and encountering surprise fees late in the booking process.

“Passengers deserve to know upfront what costs they are facing and should get their money back when an airline owes them — without having to ask,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg in a statement, adding that the changes would not only save passengers “time and money,” but also prevent headaches.

The department’s new rules, Mr. Buttigieg said, will hold airlines to clear and consistent standards when they cancel, delay or substantially change flights, and require automatic refunds to be issued within weeks. They will also require them to reveal all fees before a ticket is purchased.

Airlines for America , a trade group representing the country’s largest air carriers, said in a statement that its airlines “abide by and frequently exceed” D.O.T. consumer protection regulations.

Passenger advocates welcomed the new steps.

Tomasz Pawliszyn, the chief executive of AirHelp, a Berlin-based company that assists passengers with airline claims, called it a “massive step forward and huge improvement in consumer rights and protection” that brings the United States closer to global standards in passenger rights.

Here’s what we know about the D.O.T.’s new rules, which will begin to go into effect in October.

There’s now one definition for a “significant” delay.

Until now, airlines have been allowed to set their own definition for a “significant” delay and compensation has varied by carrier . Now, according to the D.O.T., there will be one standard: when departure or arrival is delayed by three hours for domestic flights and six hours for international flights.

Passengers will get prompt refunds for cancellations or significant changes for flights and delayed bags, for any reason.

When things go wrong, getting compensation from an airline has often required establishing a cumbersome paper trail or spending untold hours on the phone. Under the new rules, refunds will be automatic, without passengers having to request them. Refunds will be made in full, excepting the value of any transportation already used. Airlines and ticket agents must provide refunds in the original form of payment, whether by cash, credit card or airline miles. Refunds are due within seven days for credit card purchases and within 20 days for other payments.

Passengers with other flight disruptions, such as being downgraded to a lower service class, are also entitled to refunds.

The list of significant changes for which passengers can get their money back also includes: departure or arrival from an airport different from the one booked; connections at different airports or flights on planes that are less accessible to a person with a disability; an increase in the number of scheduled connections. Also, passengers who pay for services like Wi-Fi or seat selection that are then unavailable will be refunded any fees.

Airlines must give travel vouchers or credits to ticketed passengers unable to fly because of government restrictions or a doctor’s orders.

The vouchers or credits will be transferable and can be used for at least five years after the date they were issued.

Fees for checked baggage and modifying a reservation must be disclosed upfront.

Airlines and ticket agents are now required to display any extra fees for things like checking bags or seat selection clearly and individually before a ticket purchase. They will also need to outline the airline’s policies on baggage, cancellations and changing flights before a customer purchases a ticket.

The rules, which apply to all flights on domestic airlines and flights to and from the United States operated by foreign airlines, have varying start dates.

For example, automatic refunds must be instituted by the airlines within six months. But carriers have a year before they’re required to issue travel vouchers and credits for passengers advised by a medical professional not to fly.

Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram and sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to get expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places to Go in 2024 .

Christine Chung is a Times reporter covering airlines and consumer travel. More about Christine Chung

Open Up Your World

Considering a trip, or just some armchair traveling here are some ideas..

52 Places:  Why do we travel? For food, culture, adventure, natural beauty? Our 2024 list has all those elements, and more .

Mumbai:  Spend 36 hours in this fast-changing Indian city  by exploring ancient caves, catching a concert in a former textile mill and feasting on mangoes.

Kyoto:  The Japanese city’s dry gardens offer spots for quiet contemplation  in an increasingly overtouristed destination.

Iceland:  The country markets itself as a destination to see the northern lights. But they can be elusive, as one writer recently found .

Texas:  Canoeing the Rio Grande near Big Bend National Park can be magical. But as the river dries, it’s getting harder to find where a boat will actually float .

Some airline issues get you a refund, some don't. How it works | Cruising Altitude

John Schrier was traveling home to New York from Taipei last month and said the flight was interminably boring.

“As we boarded, you could see that about half of the screens had a black screen,” he told me. “Half of us were not able to watch an entertainment system.” 

Schrier said he reached out to the Taiwanese airline EVA Air on multiple platforms, including on social media during the flight, but said he initially had no luck hearing back or getting reimbursed for the inconvenience of a transpacific flight with no inflight entertainment.

Unfortunately for Schrier, it’s unlikely that compensation will be required. Airlines have conditions attached to every ticket, known as contracts of carriage, that outline their minimum obligations to passengers. Contracts of carriage, coupled with rules from regulators like the Department of Transportation, give passengers their basic rights when flying – but seatback screens are not usually considered mandatory equipment, even if they’re advertised as an available amenity.

Nevertheless, the DOT recently announced new rules that give consumers increased protections when other kinds of things go wrong, so here’s what you need to know about what is and isn’t a reimbursable offense by an airline these days.

What is an airline contract of carriage?

Airline contracts of carriage are the terms and conditions that passengers agree to when they fly. Travelers automatically sign on when they purchase their tickets, even if they don’t have to formally sign a document. The contracts typically outline an airline’s commitments for transportation, as well as what happens if your flight is delayed or canceled and other fine print related to your itinerary.

“Some airlines have a customer bill of rights to basically simplify the airline contract of carriage, but essentially it’s what’s allowed, what’s not allowed, but everybody has a little bit different verbiage,” Loulu Lima, founder of the Texas-based travel agency Book Here Give Here, told me. 

If you want to comb through the fine print, airlines make their contracts of carriage available on their websites. EVA’s contract , which covered Schrier’s trip, includes terms and conditions on how tickets can be used and (not) transferred, how stopovers work, what kinds of delays or cancellations make a passenger eligible for a refund and other assorted policies.

“It’s going to depend on the airline. An American airline is going to have a different set of rules than an Asian one,” Lima said. “The rules are really written based on the country of the corporate office.

Here are the contracts of carriage for each of the major U.S. airlines, if you want to take a look: 

• American Airlines
• United Airlines
• Delta Air Lines
• Southwest Airlines

Can passengers get a refund for broken inflight entertainment?

Usually not. 

“If you have status, you might get some loyalty points out of it, but other than maybe going on social media and making a big stink about it you’re probably not going to get anything,” Lima said.

Some airlines are also more accommodating than others and may voluntarily give passengers credits when something like that goes wrong. A few years ago, I was flying on Delta, and my seatback screen was broken, and they gave me about 2,500 SkyMiles as a goodwill gesture. 

Schrier said EVA eventually offered him about $100 in compensation.

Last week's Cruising Altitude: Another Boeing plane issue? Don't fall for the headlines.

New Department of Transportation rule increases traveler protections

While inflight entertainment isn’t typically considered critical equipment by an airline, which means it’s safe to travel even if those seatback screens aren’t working, the DOT recently announced new rules that help guarantee protections and refunds for other kinds of issues in the air. 

Part of the change mean: 

• Airlines will have to automatically issue refunds within 20 days if a passenger’s flight is canceled or significantly delayed (over three hours) and they choose not to travel on alternative flights offered.
• If a traveler pays a checked bag fee and their bag is significantly delayed, they’ll be entitled to a refund of the fee. 
• If a traveler pays in advance for an ancillary service like an extra legroom seat or Wi-Fi and then does not have access to that amenity on the flight, they will have to receive a refund for those charges.

The refund policies were also coupled with another new rule that requires more upfront, clear-cut disclosure of airline fees.

“A lot of what we hear from passengers involves refunds – or the lack thereof – for passengers who experience cancellations and disruptions.” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a statement announcing the new rules. “Infrequent fliers are especially vulnerable, since they may not know that we are here for them, and are often not told about their right to a refund, and too often instead offered compensation in form of a voucher or miles whose value amounts to pennies on the dollar of what they are actually owed. Or they enter the vortex of call centers and chatbots, sometimes giving up before they get their money back.”

Schrier, for example, said he had a lot of trouble getting through to EVA to file his complaint. 

It’s definitely frustrating for travelers who are on a long flight without functioning entertainment. I’m usually totally dependent on the seatback screen for my distractions while flying. But if the alternative is for a flight to get significantly delayed or canceled while technicians fix the operating system, I think I’d rather just get going. 

Zach Wichter is a travel reporter for USA TODAY based in New York. You can reach him at [email protected].