Supercharge Your Travel Marketing: Holiday Edition

Though in some ways it may still feel like 2020, we are, in fact, beginning our initial descent into the 2022 area 🛩

So if you haven’t already hammered out your holiday communication strategy, now is the time.

Reservation volume for Thanksgiving and Christmas is up significantly not only from last year’s lackluster season but from 2019 as well. Flight searches for the period are skyrocketing, as is the demand for rental cars.

Despite lingering COVID concerns, many are determined to honor their pre-COVID holiday traditions, booking ASAP and taking comfort in flexible cancelation policies. Still others are sitting on potential bookings, monitoring travel restrictions as the holidays draw nearer before committing to their plans. The trend toward last-minute bookings is considerably stronger than in previous seasons. And, of course, there are those who will simply stay put, whatever their reasons may be.

What were once reliable patterns – think travel surges the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, December 23rd, and the Sunday after Christmas – are no longer a given. Travelers seem to be exploring a wider variety of schedules – planning to head off for the holidays earlier and return home later – likely a product of work-from-anywhere policies.

With so many variables at play and a constantly evolving landscape, it’s arguably more challenging than ever before to identify individual needs and tailor communications accordingly. With that, the potential for sending irrelevant and even irksome content has only increased. How can you predict what your customers want (and how they’ll behave) in such unpredictable times? 🤷

The good news is, predicting real and specific intent – even in these messy times – to create truly personalized customer experiences isn’t just some pipe dream. The technology to do it exists, and it continues to improve. Splio is proof of this fact. At long last, you can say buh-bye to batch-and-blast! So long to spray-and-pray! Ta-ta to — you get the picture, right?!

Splio’s powerful predictive engine takes the guesswork out of targeting. It looks at the entirety of your first-party data, picking up on user traits and patterns of behavior to identify the audiences most likely to convert; it incorporates into its modeling not only explicit user behaviors, but implicit signals that other tech typically ignores, allowing it to predict intent with unmatched accuracy. So what does all of this mean for you this holiday season?

It means you can easily:

1. Extend your reach. Identify broader audiences for your offers by leveraging all available data points, rather than relying heavily on a handful of past transactions and assumptive segments.
2. Find the perfect audience for any topic – promote niche destinations, boost upgrades, increase occupancy rates – within any booking window.
3. Strategically time your communications. Easily identify early birds, last-minute bookers, and everyone in between to maximize the response to every offer. This is an especially good time to allay residual travel fears and attract those still sitting on their holiday plans.
4. Uncover untapped revenue opportunities. Identify trending topics and high-potential destinations that would otherwise be overlooked. Integrate these topics into existing campaigns – or use them as the basis for new campaigns, increasing campaign volume and revenue without fatiguing your customers.

Check out this short video to learn more:

 

Times are tough, but marketing doesn’t have to be. With the right tools, you can take off in no time – even when the weather is bad.

Happy Holidays, indeed 😉