Fast insights for travel and hospitality

Market Logic Team

Elizabeth P. Morgan, Co-founder and CMO of Market Logic Software, was joined by Caroline Bremner, Head of Travel & Tourism Research at Euromonitor International and Rahul Tongia, VP AI Engineering at Market Logic Software to discuss speed to insights in the travel and hospitality sector. Read on for a summary of how much has changed since the last webinar 11 months ago.

Harnessing digital disruption for success

Online travel has been a major disruptor. It accounts for billions of additional revenue in travel every year and enables greater facilitation of travel as well. It’s no surprise that rates of online travel sales are high, especially in Australasia and North America.

Last year, international tourist arrivals grew by nearly 6% to 1.4 billion. Travel will continue to grow: by 2030, 76% of the world will be connected to the internet. The industry has started to simplify the travel process by using biometric data, which will lead to even more trips taken.

Looking at digital transformation in action

Digital transformation can come in many shapes and sizes – and it’s not just global brands that are transforming. Small independent producers and suppliers are going paperless or moving to new systems for their ventures. They are tackling business problems using technology and applying it holistically across the business while maintaining a consumer-centric mindset.

Seamless travel

Seamless travel is the combination of speed, comfort, personalization and efficiency, and it’s what everyone in the travel industry is striving for. Travel and hospitality presents the opportunity to address the many potential pain points across the customer journey.

Curb to gate biometrics

77% of airports and 71% of airlines are planning to research or invest in biometric identification management. Aruba Happy Flow is one such example: it provides smooth passage through the airport with multi-stakeholder interoperability. Using facial recognition technology, passengers can walk straight from the curb to the plane, and only have to show their passports once.

“AI is one of the most important things humanity is working on. It is more profound than electricity or fire.” – Google CEO Sundar Pichai

We are just at the beginning with AI. According to McKinsey, AI could potentially have a 15% impact on travel in terms of value creation. The capabilities of AI and machine learning are growing at unprecedented levels. Improved sales and marketing functionality, personalized messaging to ensure greater conversion and reduce churn.

The customer journey is linked to IoT

By 2030, 76% of the global population will be online – and not just on their smartphones. The Internet of Things means that devices, such as wearables, cars, households, hotel rooms, etc. will all be talking to each other, using data from 76% of the world’s population.

“By 2030, 76% of the global population will be online. That means data from 76% of the world’s population will be at our fingertips.” – Caroline Bremner, Euromonitor International

The internet is already intrinsically linked to the customer journey :

83% of people research online before travelling
48% book online
36% book day trips at their destination
88% access online information during their trip

Disruption has become the new normal

The travel and hospitality industry has to be agile and run with new developments, and it has to take a more consumer-centric view. Biometrics (“selfies for seamless travel”) help us hone in on the individual and help them move seamlessly through the airport. AI is only at the beginning of its potential for continued, exponential disruption in the travel and hospitality industry.

Speed to insight

Seamlessness is all well and good for travellers, but what about seamlessness for the insights profession? Insights professionals are expected to stay on top of the ever-increasing amount of data that disruptions and developments in the travel and hospitality industry create, but it simply isn’t humanly possible – especially with the massive amount of IoT data headed their way.

Using AI, Market Logic’s Insights Platform creates a knowledge graph that connects all of the unstructured data and the structured data into one model that reflects the fundamentals of the marketplace, which they call The Market Logic ®.

For example, The Market Logic ® understands that travellers with similar behaviours can be grouped in segments, which are served by competing destinations and hospitality services. The Market Logic® also understands that not all data is created equally: a report from Euromonitor, for example, is more valuable than a single guest feedback comment.

The Market Logic® uses both a push and pull function to get the right insights to the right place at the right time. For push, AI personalizes and pushes relevant news to different stakeholders in the organization, depending on their interests, on an easy to use news dashboard.

So if a hotel manager is interested in guest satisfaction, they will see news and information about outstanding new guest experiences, while a product manager hunting for new destinations will see news and updates about that kind of content specifically.

For pull, an AI search experience allows anyone to search and get instant answers from all of the data and research without having to read hundreds of pages.