SINGAPORE, 7 January 2020: To help travel sellers to stay ahead of the curve, Amadeus has compiled a summary of insights and trends for the year ahead while identifying challenges and a sales strategy.
Amadeus says key trends are disrupting the way travel sellers communicate to their audiences, and the way travellers engage with travel brands too.
Rise of mobile
As travel marketers plan to spend 45% of their digital advertising budgets on mobile this year, travel sellers must optimise their sites for mobile and offer a booking app, or they will lose traffic at an astounding rate.
Mobile offers revenue opportunities too. Among younger generations and emerging economies, the smartphone has usurped the laptop as the travel research, booking and content sharing platform of choice and mobile travel sales are predicted to make up 50% of all sales by 2021, and value of USD108 billion.
The superiority of search, with SEO still proving king among travel sellers. Indeed, travel sellers are still spending 60% of their search budgets on SEO. SEM continues to grow in competitivity, meaning those that want to leverage SEM should rely on data to continuously identify where the opportunities for ROI from both paid and organic search approaches lie.
The importance of video, given that 37% of travel marketers plan to increase their video budgets in 2019. Video has been proven to be most versatile and impactful for travel sellers communicating their offering cross-channel.
That said, many are failing to jump on this opportunity, with just 8% of travel marketers’ budgets allocated to video content last year. It’s time to invest in video.
The Travel Seller Challenge
For travel sellers seeking to drive higher traffic acquisition and cement their market share, the current climate presents specific challenges to be overcome.
Choosing the right channels is paramount. Indeed, 69.8% of travel vendors believe their greatest challenge to be identifying the right channels and formats for their content.
Managing a limited budget was named the main obstacle by 63.5% of surveyed travel sellers in a recent report. With US travel ad spend hitting a staggering USD7.6B in 2018, it can be hard to compete with big spenders on digital advertising.
Choosing the right vendor to support your traffic acquisition journey is complicated as there are around 7000 different marketing technology providers. The options can be overwhelming. Rather than investing in endless different products, each with different operating systems and additional requirements for maintenance, select a solution that caters to all your needs in one platform.
Rocket launching sales
In light of such a travel ecosystem, ensuring steady sales growth is about staying relevant.
Join the dots between data sources in order to fuel a customer-centric digital advertising campaign. Think of your strategy as a living animal that needs constant feeding with data from multiple origins. These multiple data streams can be managed with the help of an all-in-one specialist tool, rather than relying on single-clink strategies, or combining multiple tools.
Tailor your offering to what customers want to stay relevant. Reports show this is an area of low-confidence for travel sellers, with data showing that only 36% of travel executives rated their company’s current personalisation initiative highly. In particular, when trying to capture the younger market, personalisation isn’t an accessory, it’s a must.
In 2020, for example, Amadeus says solo travel is on the rise, especially among women. In addition, sustainable travel is becoming an increasingly pressing concern across the demographics. A shift in customer priorities is inevitable, so it is vital that you stay alert and embrace the changing expectations and demands.
Communicate cross channel to ensure your products meet the audiences that matter. This means keeping all offers up-to-date and bookable on all channels and making your digital presence consistent regardless of channel.
(Source: Amadeus summary insights for traffic acquisition)
