How to Enhance Personalisation with Mobile Travel Communication
Posted by Mike Atherton on 04 December, 2017
Travel Apps Merchandising Document Delivery Travel Risk Assessment
Personalisation has always been a key element of traveller satisfaction; we all like to feel as though we’re being individually catered to and business travellers are no different. Mobile travel communication makes it easier than ever for TMCs and corporate travel managers to provide travellers with everything they need for a truly personalised experience—here’s how.
Personalised Itineraries
Mobile technology presents travel managers with a golden opportunity to provide an end-to-end experience for business travellers. Mobile travel itinerary apps can help you provide your travellers with a single consolidated itinerary document that includes everything needed for a smooth trip, from flight and ground travel information to check-in and destination guides.
What’s more, many apps allow travel managers to create custom automated rules for delay and cancellation alerts, traffic and security incidents—taking personalisation one step further by making the experience fit with different traveller needs and desires.
Personalised Trip Briefings
Given the era in which we live, few things are more important to business travellers than feeling safe, and what’s more comforting than the sense someone's looking out for you personally?
Increasingly, travel management platforms are providing the ability to deliver personalised trip briefings straight to your traveller’s smartphone. These briefings, based upon up-to-the-minute risk data, can be tailored to your traveller’s trip and carried with them, whether they’re visiting Barcelona or Beirut.
Providing business travellers with a comprehensive risk report is not only likely to make them feel safer, combatting what Skift has termed “Permanxiety”, it’s also going to keep them
Relevant Merchandising
There are few things more irritating than receiving promotional content or offers that are poorly timed or just plain irrelevant. In the past, the travel industry has been guilty of “broad brush” tactics when promoting ancillary products to travellers, meaning that most merchandising lacked a personal touch or TMC's have steered clear in fear of upsetting their clients.
However, modern technology and mobile communication are changing this.
As timely, relevant calls to action can now be automated in the context of a wider traveller communication strategy, TMC's can position traditional merchandising as a way of minimising unavoidable traveller spend by sending promotional offers that make sense to the traveller and saves the client money by reducing expenses. And of course make you a little money.
For most business travellers, the best time for promotional content such as car hire or seating upgrades is post-booking—so for the offer to feel personal and useful to the traveller and not like spam, it’s crucial this window is targeted.
This is where the right post-booking merchandising apps can help. By making sure your traveller sees the right call to action, via the right channel at the right time, you create a positive nudge in the right direction, either filling out their missing itinerary segments or engaging with new relevant travel items that will help them on their trip.
Alongside this, segmenting your traveller data into groups can help you target the right travellers with relevant and useful offers which suit their personal circumstances. The use of metrics such as traveller demographic, trip type, or trip destination groups together the travellers you want to target for specific merchandising opportunities—making any offer feel as though it was picked personally for the traveller and their trip.
Itinerary Updates
We’ve all heard the old aphorism “it’s the little things in life that count”, and this is especially true of business travel. Traveller satisfaction and a friction-free trip often hinge on the details so it’s the little personal touches that set you apart.
Top of this list should be keeping your travellers aware of any change to their itinerary before and during their trip. It could be as simple as a notification reminding them to check-in or something more complex like flight cancellation or rescheduling information. Mobile technology is increasingly providing this, with select travel management apps providing in-app updates and SMS notifications deliverable straight to the traveller’s device.
Some travel management apps even provide for in-app currency and travel updates to travellers in the field, which may not sound like much but make all the difference in creating a more personal experience for your traveller.
Modern technology is making complex personalisation of communication with your travellers more accessible than ever, encompassing everything from post-booking merchandising to risk awareness messaging. At Mantic Point we provide a full suite of mobile travel communication apps, so if you'd like to find out more about