It’s Time to Make Travel Personal

Sara Hamdan, Maria de la Fuente Corrales, Hany Abdelkawi April 2019Travel & Tourism

Passport? Check. Luggage? Check. Itinerary? Let’s plan. It’s no surprise that summer is the biggest travel season of the year in MENA. With over 3 billion travel-related search queries in MENA annually, nearly a third are dedicated to summer travel. However, the way that travellers are searching and discovering destinations online is rapidly changing.

The MENA Travel Landscape

We know that keeping in mind a user’s language preferences is important; for example, 80% of travel-related search queries in the UAE are in English due to the country’s large expat community, whereas in Saudi Arabia, 56% of searches are in Arabic. In Egypt, on the other hand, 40% of search queries are in English, 44% in Arabic and 5% in German. We also know that mobile matters, because 70% of travel searches take place on smartphones in MENA. This is just scratching the surface.

We’ve taken our analysis a step further to understand the MENA traveller a little better. With this in mind, we’re sharing this personalized approach empowered by Google solutions that will help brands and advertisers connect with summer travellers this year.

End of ‘The Average’ Era

Taking a closer, detailed look into your customer will pay off. The general idea is to understand how different and unique the travel experience is and personalize it for your consumer. No two customers, journeys or expectations are the same. That’s the reason you can no longer consider ‘the average’ traveller, journey or expectation. The end of the ‘average age’ means mining key data and generating insights to help you meet your ideal customer’s needs. This, however, requires a mindset shift.

1. End of ‘Average Customer’

Technology isn’t the only thing that has changed - consumers themselves have changed.

Changing passenger dynamics include higher volumes of travel, interest in off-the-beaten-path experiences as major destinations become crowded, and niche interests such as gastro-tourism and eco-tourism outpacing broader travel industry growth.

→ Take Action: The key is to move away from a one-size-fits-all approach to true personalization. Data mining to understand a consumer’s interests and passions makes personalization a reality for companies of all sizes - data is the voice of your customer and everyone has access to it with tools like Google Trends and public YouTube Analytics. Check out L’Oreal’s Elvive case study for an example of how a brand used data to inform multiple, personalized creatives, yielding powerful results.

2. End of ‘Average Journey’

Every travel journey is as unique as the traveler themselves. There is no linear path from awareness to consideration to booking. Travelers are constantly changing their minds, narrowing and broadening their consideration set in unpredictable ways. The journey typically has more than 45 touchpoints, including: