A holiday is a time of leisure and while holidaying, no one would surely want to be in a mood to tackle last minute problems, annoyances or unpleasant surprises. Hence to make this time a very memorable one, availing the services of a reputed travel and tourism company that promises complete transparency and outstanding quality of information would be the wisest thing to do. The ease with which one can find relevant information is most crucial to a successful travel business enterprise. The greatest challenge that travel and tourism organizers face today, is that of improving and maintaining a consistent inflow of customers.
Here is a sneak-peek at some of the challenges:
- Low Conversion Rates: Blame it on the slow-down of global economy; the amount of people spending on travel and leisure has been dwindling down phenomenally. This has been reflecting adversely on the business of tourism companies with poor conversion rates.
- Availability of relevant Information: There is indeed a lot of information been thrown at customers in all directions and this has led to an increase in the number of people complaining about the difficulty in finding relevant information like the tour packages, itineraries, pricing, hotels and even the sight-seeing information. Hence there is a dire need of customization.
- Lack of Trained Staff: Acquiring well-educated and trained staff for selling various offerings of the travel industry has become a big problem. Sales representatives put up a poor show owing to lack of knowledge of the offerings of the company and this leads to mistrust and confusion in the minds of the customers.
In the given scenario the ideal solution to the above problems would be having a workable marketing strategy to reach out to people, engage with them and finally succeed in encouraging them to buy their products and services by offering an un-yielding platform.
The rise and growth in mobile technologies, consequently leading to a wider adoption of smartphones and tablets has people preferring mobile phones to desktops or laptops. A recent survey that shows 1 in 3 people using mobile devices for travel searches and tour planning, reiterates the growing importance and reach of mobiles. This proves the fact that now mobile applications can easily replace print product brochures, tour and itinerary displays, guides, maps and many more interactive components.
Let’s look at some of the key benefits of having mobile applications to create brand awareness and to showcase the company offerings to the world -
- Look-to-Book Ratio/Conversion: This is one of the most key ratios in the travel and tourism industry. With mobile applications, the companies can improve their look-to-book ratio by 50% or more. Smartphones and tablet based applications provide interactive services, engaging more with customers, ultimately resulting in creating more business for the company.
- Behavioral Marketing: Understanding the customer mind-set has always been one of the most important aspects of any business development strategy. Thus with advanced mobile analytics and customer profiling capabilities, companies can now gain insight into the customer’s interests and delve deeper into customer buying behavior.
- Enhanced Customer Experience: With the advent of technology, mobile applications can be easily used as tour guides, to help users find restaurants, nightlife, shopping and other attractions. This promises an enhanced travel experience and in return guarantee an increase in the rate of repeat customers.
- Providing relevant Information: Mobile applications are necessarily modular, structured and interactive. This facilitates the selection of the most relevant information as per the need. A personalized experience of this kind thus engages more and more users. Also companies can now put up their tour package information, itinerary, hotel and booking information, etc.
- Superior User experience: Tablet and Smartphone applications can deliver high quality picture galleries, videos of tourist destinations, virtual sightseeing experiences, augmented reality, audio-visual animations and guides, etc. This availability of aesthetically appealing visual tours gives a highly superior feel and user experience.
- Reduced Staff Training and Dependency: Technology indeed has more benefits and with the enormous use of mobiles and apps, companies will no more need to spend heavily on training and educating their sales staff. This naturally leads to a reduction in costs and also the dependency on human interaction to gain required information.
Thus the above facts and figures make it very clear that smartphones and tablets are here to stay. Undoubtedly Mobile Applications can take your products and services to the customers, allowing them to make a well-rounded informed decision. In today’s tech-savvy world, empowering the customer is the key to successful business.
