3 Ways to Re-Engage With Today’s Digital, “Silent Traveler”
With the exponential growth of online travel sites, today’s traveler has access to information on just about everything they need to complete a successful trip. With a couple of searches and a few clicks, pricing and availability information pops right on screen. And, of course, just about everything comes with pages and pages of all-important online reviews.
You’d think that, with everything right there at a traveler’s fingertips, online booking was the new traveler’s paradise.
That’s what a lot of us thought. But, in reality, having so much raw information thrown at you doesn’t make planning the trip easier. It can make the whole things seem confusing, overwhelming and frustrating.
It’s created an opportunity for travel and hospitality brands to re-engage with today’s traveler. And that’s exactly what today’s successful brands are doing.
Here’s how.
Tapping into the Human Emotions of Travel
Travel is always embedded with more emotion – from anticipation and joy to worry and disappointment and everything in between. When traveling for pleasure, human beings have high hopes and expectations that must be acknowledged – at the human, emotional level – before they can truly be met. When traveling frequently for business, there is often the discomfort of leaving home, missing family members and pets, and dealing with the inconveniences that come with working on the road and in the air. Each one of these human emotions carries with it the opportunity for a brand to deliver a travel experience that heightens the positives and mitigates the negatives.
Fixing Problems with Human Empathy
Most travelers are fully capable of accepting that, sometimes, flight connections get missed, rooms get overbooked or wrongly booked, or events get cancelled. They’re not expecting you to play God. But they are expecting you to demonstrate rapid response, empathetic listening skills, and prompt resolution that is appropriate to the problem that arose.
Soliciting Feedback and Proving You’re Listening
You may think that every angry traveler call you’ve received represents the total of bad experiences your travelers have had. But of course, that’s not true. It is true that your unhappy travelers are far more likely to reach out and complain – loudly and clearly – than your happy travelers will tell you how wonderful everything was. You can’t possibly know how well (or how poorly) various aspects of your travelers’ experiences are unless you’re willing to reach out and find out. To be effective, it’s best to use a multipronged approach that includes online surveying, outbound surveys, and providing a direct but private feedback opportunities through a specialized inbox that is monitored continuously, allowing you to respond immediately.
The closer you can get to empowering immediate or real-time feedback to you, the greater your chances of reducing the traveler tendency to hop online and tell the world every magnified detail of their disappointment.
At Skybridge Americas, we specialize in providing 24-7, first rate traveler support and service. If you’d like to learn more about how we can help you re-engage your travelers, please reach out. We would love to talk with you.
Bobby Matthews
Senior Vice President, Sales and Marketing
Skybridge Americas
bmatthews@skybridgeamericas.com
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