Everyone knows what has long been considered the baby of the travel sector is finally starting to grow up. However, relative to other segments such as airlines, hotels, cruising, packages, car-hire etc Tour & Activities still has a long way to go. The advantage of being the baby though is that you get to see the mistakes your ‘older siblings’ have made and you try to avoid them.
For Tour & Activities, it is a similar situation. For a long time, the companies operating in the sector were considered too small, too fragmented, not technically sophisticated enough, too uncoordinated and in many cases not professional enough for ‘proper tourism’. And for many years, lots of those statements were probably quite true. However, that is changing and perspectives have changed. The industry at large has finally realised what the rest of us always knew – that people travel for memories & experiences not for a lovely hotel bed or a really nice airplane seat – no matter how good they are!
What were considered ‘unprofessional tours’ are now considered quirky, local and real! Companies are getting co-ordinated in their approaches to deliver multi-destination products and of course tools & technology platforms are unrecognisable from what they were 5 years ago.
ExperienceBank is leading the charge on the next big wave in helping companies understand customers, what they do, what they need and how they book. We sit in a unique, agnostic position between suppliers & distributors and we already see and understand a lot about customer behaviours. We are now entering the next data phase in association with many leading partners who through the sharing of non-personal data are bringing greater vitality to our the information being gathered. This data bank and its interpretation will show contributors what do ‘Chinese’ (or any nationality) visitors book when they travel, how far ahead they book, average spends, what devices were used for booking, product variations between countries etc. Data participants will then be able to compare their data, against the rest of the industry, offering rich valuable insights to assist sales & marketing campaigns, when to target customers with what types of messages, identify product gaps/opportunities etc
Simply put, the key to any business success is knowing your customer and providing them what they want at the right price at the right time. Being part of the DataBank project allows you to be even smarter when it comes to knowing your customers.
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