Travel + Hospitality
Companies in the Travel and Hospitality space face constant pressures to streamline costs, increase RevPAR, improve passenger yields and delight the customer. Compounding these operational issues is the market imperative to innovate with new product and service offerings to a highly-segmented customer base. In our discussions with industry leaders, four themes have emerged as table-stakes for new product design:
- Seamless guest experiences
- Customer data integration
- A better booking process
- Leveraging Web 2.0 technologies
Seamless Guest Experiences
Over the past decade, the leading casinos, resorts and theme parks have incorporated new processes and technologies to minimize the hassle of pre- and post-stay travel. For example, Disney uses bar-coded bag tags to facilitate bag handling at the Orlando airport, within the Walt Disney World Resort and onboard the Disney Cruise ships. Once a guest drops their luggage at their home airport, the next time they see their bags is onboard the ship or in their hotel room. Other brands are implementing RFID, customer analytics, recommendation engines and mobile applications to create integrated service delivery processes.
How we can help
Enablus’ User Experience Design team will work with your service delivery teams to understand the nuances of your guests and passengers and conceptualize seamless experiences that bridge the online, handheld, and in-person “moments of truth.”
Customer Data Integration
Fifty years ago, “guest recognition” and CRM consisted of 3x5 note cards stored at the Front Desk. Today, travelers have multiple “profiles” based on whether they are traveling on business or pleasure, resort or city, domestic or international. Adding to this complexity is the plethora of customer databases which result from mergers and acquisitions and external GDSs, TMCs, and suppliers. Sorting through this maze of data is a challenge for guest services, revenue management, and marketing.
How we can help
When designing new offerings, we can assist your organization to find the best sources for customer data inside, and outside, your organization. We will leverage the insights of this data to design and validate User Personas which form the goals for the new product or service offering. During development, we will build processes to extract, transform and load (ETL) the data into a operational database and connect it to a new website, web application, or rich internet application.
A Better Booking Process
Most travel web sites and online booking engines use a common strategy for fare search, retrieval, and booking - the user describes location, dates of travel, class of service, and then waits for results. Some sites may use AJAX controls to filter and sort the search results. But the overall experience remains “me-too” from site to site.
How we can help
Working with Adobe Flex 3.0, and Silverlight, we can build an online booking engine that is highly usable, compelling and engaging to your guests. With Adobe LiveCycle Data Services, your site will minimize the use of pagination and maintain near-real time connectivity with your available inventory.
Leveraging Web 2.0 Technologies
To-date, much of the industry’s fascination with social networking and user generated content has been largely experimental in nature. Many travel social networking sites chase the tail of TripAdvisor.com and fail to provide anything that is truly differentiated. Despite this current situation, there are still many opportunities to leverage Web 2.0 technologies to augment your brand initiatives.
How we can help
Our Product Strategy Consultants will help you sort the confusing maze of social networking, mash-ups, content delivery, and service-oriented architectures to arrive at a product concept that meets your business objectives and audience needs.
