Back to the future: Offering high street service levels online

In the first of a series of articles to help agents sell more holiday flights online, Iskra Rasheva, marketing manager of Vayant Travel Technologies, says it’s important to provide a ‘human shaped’ shopping experience for customers.

"Finding the right holiday should be fun – but traditionally searching online for flights has been more akin to filling in a tax form, laborious box ticking, form filling, tricky calculations and, and the end of it all, still not being quite sure that everything adds up. The search experience was shaped by the requirements of computer booking systems, and the customer had to do the hard work.

In an age when the web-enabled customer is king, that kind of approach is not going to fly.   Customers today know that they – literally – have a world of choice. Choice is good, but too much choice is bad. It is all too often bewildering and customers need help finding their way through all the options. In other online retail environments, customers expect vendors to come to them with an attractive offer.  Netflix suggests a movie they might like to see, based on their viewing history.  Amazon suggests household items to go with the appliance they’ve just bought.  These retailers have taken the pain out of search, so how can travel sellers present themselves to consumers in a way which is irresistible?

The industry, led by airlines, has started to move towards more proactive, ‘human-shaped’ search and discovery with the concept of ‘inspiration’.  Marketing initiatives like BA’s Picture Your Holiday invite the customer to package their ‘perfect holiday’, using a blend of attractive destination and activity images.  easyJet’s Inspire Me, leveraging the budget carrier’s value-focused brand, starts the online journey with a radial map search, showing the customer how far their £50 can get them, and then allowing them to refine their search by selecting an activity like winter sports, night life or time on the beach.

Travel sellers of all kinds can go further to guide customers through the dense forest of travel choices to find their perfect vacation.  And let’s remember that this forest will get even harder to navigate as travel providers introduce ancillaries and therefore more choice and more complexity.

The key to unlocking this complexity is personalization:  using everything you know about your customer to drive offers and delight the shopper. Top rank retailers have always known that personalization is the most effective way to service the most demanding customers.  Stores like Harrods of London or Barneys New York offer personal shoppers to entice high-spending customers to spend with them and build lasting relationships.  Personal shoppers know their clients’ tastes, budget – and intimate measurements – so they can pinpoint the purchases most likely to appeal.

In a world where everyone can be just as demanding as the Harrods customer, innovative travel sellers are bringing a ‘Harrods-level’ of service to search.  They are using next generation search technology to filter out irrelevant options and present the customer with a manageable selection of priced vacations, with everything the customer needs included in the package.  In short they are doing the heavy lifting on search, and giving customers what they really want: their perfect vacation.

This is a revolutionary shift towards a customer-centric service model for online travel search.  And ironically this new model recalls the experience customers used to get from their high street travel agent, who would listen to what they wanted out of their holiday and then come up with a set of meaningful offers, based on their wishes and budget. 

In a sense we’ve come full circle, from high street shops with travel agents, through to online travel shops where the customer does the travel agent’s job, and finally back to online travel shops that act like travel agents.  Travel sellers who understand this customer revolution, and act on it, can build powerful human-shaped brands that stand out in an increasingly competitive market."