“Even today it’s exciting to see new applications enhancing customer's journey”

Travel companies must be very clear in their objectives before they proceed with adding features such as videos, blogs or other UGC.

These features can be useful tactics towards objectives such as branding, promotion, search engine optimisation, building content or soliciting market intelligence. In each case, it is crucial for measurement to be aligned with the goals. 

Overall, the industry is seeing social marketers challenged by campaign measurement, largely stemming from the misalignment of goals and measurement metrics.

Some advocates of social media marketing mention that success in this space must be measured by whatever metrics already drive your business – e-commerce sites should increase sales, media sites should increase page views etc. They strictly recommend that success in travel social media shouldn’t be considered as something other than supporting one’s core business.

For instance, a company like InterContinental Hotels Group has indicated that its social marketing efforts must be tied to generating revenue. 

Overall, organisations have started realising the potential and the impact of social marketing on their communications and engagements with their guests. 

Be it for working on around one portion of the trip, such as the flight, or the whole travel experience, experts recommend that social media should be built around the user's need. There is a lot of discussion and collaboration that happens today both pre-trip and post-trip. Only a fraction of this is captured through established social media tools for travel. Much of it occurs through face-to-face interaction, on email, or through horizontal platforms like Facebook. It is believed that there is certainly an opportunity that exists to leverage social media solutions to help users have a more engaging experience throughout the travel lifecycle – and in so doing generate more revenue.

P&O Cruises’ new media manager Elliott Pritchard says there is a wealth of research and communication that takes place in the travel lifecycle.

“A holiday operator or travel agent does not need to own that process end-to-end – for example, Google Wave may end up being a great tool for collaborative planning, but that doesn’t mean we should be building our own version. However, it is worth addressing where we can add value.”

He added,” One of the most basic - but also the best – principles of social media is being useful to the community that you want to target. Taken on its own merit, this drives other significant measures such as awareness, interactions, and ultimately bookings.” 

Engagement

More and more airlines are embracing social media marketing for promoting their brands, engagement and brand loyalty. But much of this activity is still “experimental – and may be ephemeral”. 

In a recent interview with EyeforTravel’s Ritesh Gupta, Ric Shreves, Founding Partner, water&stone, pointed out that there is still a little acceptance / recognition of an agreed set of meaningful metrics.

“It’s understandable, as this is a hard sector to measure. How does one measure “engagement”? Certainly, user site activity and membership levels are very useful and easy for everyone to grasp, but aside from numbers related to those key factors, there is a little agreement in this space. I look at metrics as part of your ongoing monitoring and feedback cycles -- they are indicators of the impact of your efforts and should help inform your strategic decisions, but the bottom remains the ultimate judge of success,” Shreves had said. 

From utility perspective, Pritchard said, “If the only interaction a customer has with your brand is once a year when they book their holiday, it’s hard to build loyalty. Online - and in particular social media and social applications – afford us a more sustained communication platform that helps us to build customer engagement.”

Pritchard says an Internet user’s perception of your brand is defined by the sum total of their experience – whether it’s on your site or elsewhere. 

“The principle of building engagement should apply across both – we don’t have to become like the Skittles website, but if the only way your brand website has changed is a discreet link to a Facebook group, is that enough?”

New sites 

Pritchard says there are quite a few impressive travel planning sites out there – TripIt, Tripbase and Travelmuse for example – driven by the recognition that there are many interactions along that customer’s journey, and they’re not all a transactional one. Is having an ‘inspiration’ section of your website enough to drive customer needs? Those needs are rarely defined in one place, from one service, he says.   

Whereas the semantic web has not really gained traction in this area, the possibilities for the future are exciting. The extension of travel planning software into ‘intelligent agents’ will help to deliver against those needs from a myriad of data sources. In this sense, adoption of the semantic web will just become another extension of that principle of being useful.Even today it’s exciting to see new applications enhancing that customer journey, feels Pritchard. 

“It’s easy to think of applications like Hotel Evolution by Runtriz extending with location-based social networking services.  The social aspect to this is key, a travel decision or experience is rarely defined in isolation and under our control, no matter how hard we might try,” concluded Pritchard.