EyeforTravel’s Digital Strategy Summit

May 2019, London

Europe's biggest event for commercial and digital travel execs

Why keeping metrics simple is the way to go

Travel brands can make huge leaps in performance through relatively simple measurements and metrics finds a recent white paper

Keeping it simple is often touted as the route to long-term success in business, but sometimes that is easier said than done. However, a recent sponsored white paper from EyeforTravel and Datumize - Understanding Customer Behaviour Through Demand-Based Analytics – finds that rigorous monitoring of demand-based data really can make a difference to overall performance. Rigorous it needs to be, but the steps are fairly simple – just by tracking own-site searches, business-to-business requests, drop outs from across the funnel and service availability can give bookings an impressive boost.

Often, says Josep Maria Gomis, Travel Solutions Architect at Datumize, “companies know what they sell – but they don’t know what they don’t sell”. Even monitoring simple elements like geographies from where requests are received can lead to new streams of business.

...companies know what they sell – but they don’t know what they don’t sell

Five years ago, Datumize deployed its solution for a client that was receiving most of its requests from Spain. “The sales director knew this already. He was also blasé when we discovered that the second most common type of request was for inventory in France,” says Gomis. However, the client was astonished and disbelieving when they discovered that the fourth region requests were emerging from was China.

The Datamize team explained that the reason they weren’t selling to China was because they didn’t have a dedicated product.  “We consider this a lost sale,” says Gomis, adding that after just a month of offering products for the Chinese market, profits started to rise.

Languages are another way to understand lost sales and improve business performance quickly. “One of our customers discovered that people were looking for products on its Polish webpage but typing in queries in German,” says Datumize founder Nacho Lafuente. “This might seem like a stupid case but it’s tens of thousands of euros that you are not converting. If you are looking for Crete, a Greek island, on a Polish page, then the result is not found.”

By analysing language requests, you can discover that some customers are not finding products that you have available because of a language gap. Indeed, not every destination is the same in every language; this is an obvious measurement metric to judge whether the offering matches what your clients are searching for.

A true picture

Demand-based analytics creates opportunities to match a brand’s product with the true picture of what customers want and are looking for. 

Measuring relatively simple metrics, as described, also gives brands an opportunity to search for patterns and critically when anomalies might occur. For Spanish tour operator W2M, which receives 250 million availability requests per day, finding mismatches has been a key driver of business performance. W2M has set up some automatic alarms to flag up higher-than-expected error ratios, so the IT team can respond immediately.

When you are dealing with a highly competitive business such as travel, margins are so low that you need to squeeze [every] euro

“We went from a 10% level of error to under 5%, and I would say that represents between 5% and 10% growth in terms of sales,” says Ernesto Sigg Rodríguez, Head of Clients and Supplier Performance, W2M. This has made a major difference to his business where margins are very slim.

Making dynamic changes and working across a business to implement them requires constant inputs. Says Lafuente: “When you are dealing with a highly competitive business such as travel, margins are so low that you need to squeeze [every] euro,” he says. “It’s not only about having a general understanding or perception of how things are going. You need to photograph every single minute and have alarms for things if they break certain thresholds.”

To find out more about what demand-based analytics can do for our business download the white paper - Understanding Customer Behaviour Through Demand-Based Analytics.  It includes:

  • Real-world examples and case studies
  • Industry survey data
  • Data-based techniques and areas of focus that can improve business performance immediately
  • Expert insight.

This white paper features insights from:

  • Europcar
  • IHG
  • The Travel Corporation
  • Thomas Cook Hotels & Resorts
  • Vueling
  • W2M

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