Round table: maximizing digital potential

Paul Richer: What difference does personalisation make to customer engagement?

Kevin Thorogood: A lot of personalisation is geared to what can you sell them next, the next best offer. The companies that do reasonably well are those that take a wider view, across sales, marketing and service. Much more customer-centric, more targeted marketing, more segmentation, but it’s still largely campaign-driven. Let’s think about what’s the right conversation for them, not necessarily my view of the world, what I want to sell them next.

Ali Hashmi: If you look at the Saudi market, 80% of the queries related to travel happen in Arabic. If you think about the overall journey of a traveller, we all know that hotels have figured out what language you want your newspapers in, when you like your laundry. These types of questions have been answered, but when you get further up the funnel, we’re not there yet. I personally, at Google, work a lot with tourism boards and hotels. Tourism boards are a very intangible offering. Most are not in the business of selling anything. They’re promoting a destination. The two biggest players in the region, Dubai and Abu Dhabi in terms of their presence, mean different things to different people. Talk to people and they want to go to those places for more than sun, sand and beach. Our emerging ad technologies try to allow people to engage and self-select.

Kevin T: It’s interesting, a lot of personalisation is based on what you know about the customer and it gets segmented and you treat them as you think you should as a segment. It’s adaptive personalisation. Working out what they want to do right now in this moment. A lot of people talk about customer journeys. Customers are on multiple journeys. It’s almost taking that view of listening and understanding and changing our behaviour for the customer.

Paul: Do you think in the Middle East and Africa, people are more inclined to want to talk to other people? Is a lot of personalisation guiding people in one-to-one physical conversations?

Meritxell Clemente: Exactly. Personalisation starts from inspiring, then searching, and then guiding the traveller through the entire journey, in all possible channels. In order to facilitate this task to the travel industry, we commissioned Future Foundation to understand tomorrow’s traveller and we identified six groups of travellers by 2030 (Simplicity Searchers, Cultural Purists, Ethical Travellers, etc..) This will help travel industry players to adjust their offer and technology and provide suggested recommendation through the entire journey. Personalisation is proven to improve conversion rates.

Kevin Clapson: You’re asking about local and cultural differences. Probably the biggest one where we see a difference in how they behave is the speed. We see people in Middle East make a decision in a fraction of the time. In Europe or the UK, it’s 65 to 70 days. If they know they want to travel, they make up their minds in 10 days and go. They don’t tend to book months in advance.

Farooq bhatti: We found travellers in the Middle East visit 12 sites, and travellers in Europe [visit] 20 sites. The journey is almost 50% faster.

James Osmond: If it’s late notice booking, you don’t have time. If you’re staying in five days’ time you have to make a decision quickly.

Kevin C: I think financially it’s not as big a burden for a lot of these people. If you’re not getting married, buying a car or a house, it’s probably what you spend the most money on. A lot of travellers from the Middle East travel four times a year.

Oscar Herencia: They have the time, they have the money. They want to travel. They want luxury, most of them, in the Middle East countries, and are looking for a minimum 5-star hotel. With GCC people, when they are at the destination, they request for luxury extras. When they are at the destination, they request, ‘For tomorrow, I want a BMW. After tomorrow, S-Class. I need 12 hours of a personal shopper.’ Different kind of traveller.

James: There tends to be quite a lot more repeat business with some of the Middle Eastern large hotels. Same customers going back four or five times. If you’re very familiar, you don’t need to do all the research.

Paul: Is personalisation set to increase?

Kevin C: Personalisation of advertising properly. We built our business of personalisation of content. Now we’re starting to see, there’s so much data around, people who are clever with data can do good stuff. If I know someone’s stayed at Marriott five or six times, do I need to advertise to them at all? We want incremental revenue. Every time we see one of your users, I’m not going to send them the standard message, because they’re probably going to book anyway, but how am I going to get them to book a suite instead?

Kevin T: The biggest challenge is that most of the companies in travel have spent money on digital but on travel, it’s the touch points. Customers may have a great experience online but their expectations are when they talk to you in person, they want a similar experience. A lot of it tends to fall down here.

Paul: Tips for building a winning search engine strategy?

Ali: It’s about giving users a positive experience when they land on your website. You need to understand what your user is doing online. It was mentioned by Kevin that 61% of the hotel queries that take place in MENEA take place on mobile. The second largest search engine, YouTube, is 68%. It behoves most brands to take mobile into conversation. Google has nudged the ecosystem along with an update that came about a few months ago. Pay attention to mobile and algorithm updates. Second is video. We’re some of the largest consumers of video. Saudi Arabia is the largest consumer of YouTube content, ahead of the US. Most of that content is done off mobile. Video also has a very important role. If you go back to the first principle, creating a positive experience. If people land on your website and you have a good video, they will engage for longer. It’s going to rank higher. Particularly for folks looking to reach out to Middle Eastern consumers.

James: A contentious thought. Is it the end of SEO? The reality is, you need to advertise. Most of the time you put a query in, 95% of the time you get adverts. If you’re really going to get people coming to your website, that’s where you should be spending your money.

Ali: We would agree with that. They’re not replaceable. Brands have to get their voice out there. ‘Everyone knows about us. Everyone.’ So what? So you shouldn’t advertise? Or you shouldn’t advertise in a particular way? The SEO results will drive you to it. If you think about it more broadly, yes, you should have good content. Some organic people are going to click on organic. Anecdotally, some people prefer organic links.

Kevin C: From our point of view, in the last 9-10 months, we’ve invested a lot of time with people from Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Two years ago they would have said, ‘How do we get as many people come to our website as possible?’ We would have helped them do that. ‘What do you want them to find out about Dubai?’ ‘Great for culture.’ ‘Type in what’s good for culture.’ It’s probably going to be a TripAdvisor link. Probably worry less about investing loads in your site and making it amazing. They’re probably going to come to us anyway. Not really SEO in that sense but because our SEO is so strong, they probably can’t compete with us.

Meritxell: A search engine should solve the problems of a traveller. Technology should be able to show the traveller key relevant content. And the quality of content is key.

Paul: What do travel agencies do apart from SE marketing, what can they do to get some presence on search engines?

Farooq: Become a local digital concierge, with specific content for various travellers.

Meritxell: You also need to keep the balance. It is our responsibility to equip the travel industry players with the right technology and tools, which allow them to personalise the trip and provide key relevant content.

Kevin T: They would have to be a trusted advisor. That face-to-face conversation is really important.

Paul: How can hotels encourage direct sales? It’s a dilemma they face.

James: The hotel industry is going through some seismic change. Giving away control of its customers to the OTAs. On the other hand, Airbnb is taking some out. Hoteliers are left with the cost, the people, the structure, and all the problems. Largely it comes down to, ‘How do you get back relationships with your customers?’ [There are] lots of ways to drive more direct sales, but most people will go to a hotel’s website. They want to see videos, photographs, they want to know more about what this hotel is about. They want to go through to the booking page. They will then get the price there, and then they will leave. The main reason they leave is because they want to check the price elsewhere.

Oscar: You always have to look for the best solution. In our case, for searching hotels and flights, it’s to look for a different experience. All the travellers looking for multi destination. Most of the OTAs cannot offer this.

Ali: We’re looking to drive volume and ultimately improve conversion rates. You can work on each site.

Paul: Encouraging direct sales and improving conversion rates come together?

Ali: So much of the experience. What can they find here that they cannot find elsewhere? Booking engines are all going to talk about the entire suite of companies and hotels. You have to tell your own story. What are you doing in your own site, telling your own story in a way that’s sticky? We need to make sure the internal accounting process sees a line here. A lot of businesses tend to look at cost of sale to an OTA, being a cost of sale. They look at search engine marketing being a marketing expense, even though both are channels to delivery. All the sophisticated players have a cost of sales discussion. In our region, quite a few people still look at these as different. We’ve bought them onto this understanding. Search is a channel for sale, OTA is a channel for sale. One can charge you 20% and the other can charge you whatever, and it’s about volume. As long as you don’t disadvantage one over the other.

James: Facebook lookalikes, Google, are actually great for helping you find the right kind of customers. The analysis around who are the right customers for your hotel? Who spends more, comes back more often, drives advocacy?

Kevin C: We see 50% of people who say price is the key factor. If the price is okay, you won’t necessarily go elsewhere. They often leave because they want to know more about the property, an unbiased view.

Paul: What makes a good booking process? How do we keep them there?

Meritxell: There is no standardised definition for conversion. Each travel agency must define its own methodology to define and measure conversation rate (number of visitors versus bookings, banners to booking ratio, newsletter view to click ratio) Basically we’re coming back to the beginning of the discussion: there is a trend between the relevance of the content, the quality of that content and the conversation rates. I am sure it happened to you all: searching for your next holidays you land on a page with different options. You see this amazing package with a nice hotel. You want to see the pictures, you click on the reviews, then you want to allocate it on a map. You like it, already 10 minutes looking at pictures, reading reviews, looking at that hotel. You want to book, you want to click on it, the price looks good, and then, suddenly, when you decide to click, the price is different. As a customer, the trust is not there anymore. Conversion rates are all about making sure that what you’re showing is relevant, the quality of what you’re showing is very good and that the flow is easy.

Technology has to serve the purpose of the traveller when looking for a trip. Your online site is the door of your shop. Conversion is not only about online. You have to make sure that lookers who were not converted online, do it offline. And you need to put in place the right tools (online and offline) to make sure that what you show is trustworthy. It’s about monitoring what the traveller is doing. If you monitor me online and I do not book, then you need to track me offline.

Oscar: As you say, on the booking process, people have to be attracted. We try to do it as fast as possible.

James: Most bookings are still taking place on desktop. Searches are on mobile.

Ali: It’s really interesting. The number of transactions have historically lagged because advertisers have been behind the trend. How do you get conversion rates up? Desktop is really undersold. We did a UIUX audit for one local advertiser. You’re trying to understand the steps of the journey and simplify as much as possible. When you land on a landing page, how many steps does it take to get from there to your booking? If you look at a brand which has figured it out, it’s about three steps. You don’t have to even use your keypad. Understand the value of mobile. People start on one device and continue somewhere else. Part of the reasons why mobile’s value is under-indexed is because we don’t fully have our attribution models figured out. Within the world of universal analytics, how to bring all of these touch points into a single platform? If someone was exposed to your ad on mobile, how did that play a part in conversion? Right now it’s under-reported. People buying these products, are mobile first, incredibly sophisticated. Our advertisers are catching up. Many of them have had a bad experience over the past couple of years with mobile. They say, ‘Conversions don’t come.’ Even in some of the more developed markets, that is improving. I would say, ‘Relook at it. Now is a good time.’ The asset quality is significant.

Some of the clients are concerned. ‘We don’t have an app’ — which is sometimes missing the point. There is a lot you can do with personalisation even within mobile web. Imitation is the best form of flattery. Figure out what works with these people and carry it into your own business.

Farooq: We use Amazon as a benchmark. Your travel should not be any more complicated than Amazon.

James: I think all innovation comes from looking at other categories and stealing with pride and reapplying vigorously. There is an awful lot hotels could do to take good ideas from Booking.com. You shouldn’t even have to take the credit card details from someone on a phone. You should send them a booking confirmation and they should be able to do it later. Then you’ve got their email.

Kevin T: Switching from mobile to web is interesting. Part of it is simplicity. If you’re working on your mobile, you put in your basics on your holiday. If you come to a website or call centre, if they have that information; something that really frustrates people is being asked for their details twice.

Ali: One of the folks we work with, Atlantis, doesn’t have a mobile app. What do they do when you try to book on their website? If you leave off at a certain point, they send you a personalised email: ‘We understand you tried to book. Click here to continue on.’ Fantastic. Non-intrusive. Not forcing you to make a booking. Even in a non-app environment. ‘That person did enter their email.’ When you’re on your work email, you might go onto your desktop and do it. We literally shouldn’t have to make a choice between mobile and desktop.

James: Enchantment messaging should be very big in 2016. That’s what we call it. Friendly towards guests.

Kevin C: The opportunity for that to happen on a mobile is so much higher. You’re booking, someone calls you. You run out of service on a tunnel on a train.

Kevin T: You receive that email and you find it highly relevant. Problem is, that company will be sending you campaigns. One of those emails will come through, ‘Would you like to come on a cruise with us?’ Only five minutes ago you sent me something relevant and now it’s this.

Meet the experts

Paul Richer, Founding Partner, Genesys

Paul Richer is Genesys’ founding partner.He is a Fellow of the Institute of Travel & Tourism and a member of the Chartered Institute of Marketing.

Kevin Clapson, VP Display Advertising EMEA, TripAdvisor

Kevin Clapson started his media life in agencies, then moving to Associated Newspapers and then Tripadvisor.

James Osmond, General Manager EMEA, TripTease

Triptease is a SaaS company that builds digital tools to better relationships between hotels and guests.

Meritxell Clemente, Senior Manager Leisure Development, Western Europe Middle East and Africa, Amadeus

Starting her career in airlines, she joined Amadeus IT Group in 2006.

Kevin Thorogood, Global Head of Capital Markets, Thunderhead

Kevin Thorogood is responsible for understanding and addressing the needs of financial institutions.

Oscar Herencia, CEO and Co-Founder, Baraka Travel Club

Oscar Herencia co-founded the company in 1997, which now offers specialised travel consultants.

Ali Hashmi, Industry Manager, Travel & Government MENA, Google

Ali Hashmi works with hotels, national tourism boards and government organisations to enhance digital presence.

Farooq Bhatti, Caliber UAE

Farooq Bhatti is a local search specialist at Caliber. He is a former business consultant from Dubai.