Today’s Travelers Demand Real-Time Messages. Can You Deliver?

It’s always been important for travel and hospitality brands to communicate with their customers. By its nature, travel is built around extremely time-sensitive services (think flights, hotel rooms, rental cars), and giving consumers a heads-up when something changes is a powerful way to reduce friction and provide a better customer experience.

That need to communicate effectively with customers has only grown stronger over the past two years. The COVID-19 pandemic has had a heavy impact on the travel space, both financial and in terms of shifting customer expectations. According to research conducted by Wakefield Research on behalf of Braze, the majority of today’s travelers now expect travel and hospitality brands to keep them up to date about the status of COVID and related regulations in locations they’re traveling to. And failing to live up to those expectations can cost you: 34% of global travelers said they’d consider booking with another company if they didn’t get the communications they expected.

To provide the kind of highly relevant, in the moment messages that travelers demand, travel and hospitality brands need more than good intentions—they need a technology stack that can support this kind of real-time customer engagement. Ensuring that you have the right tech at your disposal can also lead to stronger engagement, revenue, and retention, as well as deeper customer relationships Research conducted by Braze has found that:

• Emails triggered by travelers’ actions perform 10.8X better than time-based emails
• Leveraging two channels—instead of just one—boosts travel user lifetime by 32% on average
• Emails to travelers using dynamic message personalization drive 3.3X more purchases

These are powerful results, but only brands who have a tech stack capable of supporting action-based messaging, cross-channel engagement, and message customization will be able to achieve them. By bringing together a customer engagement platform capable of supporting time-sensitive, personalized cross-channel messaging at scale with a geofencing platform able to trigger and inform outreach based on a given traveler’s current location, brands can tailor their brand experience to each individual recipient and ensure that they’re serving up high-importance messaging to customers when and where they need it, and in the channels they prefer.

Interested in seeing what that looks like in practice? Braze and Radar have put together an exclusive look at what’s possible in travel and hospitality customer engagement. In “What Brilliant Customer Engagement Looks Like For Travelers,” we’ll walk you through a customer journey demonstrating all the ways you can take advantage of the Radar and Braze partnership to deliver travelers and stand out from the competition. Get the full guide here.