Digital Lunchbox: Put honesty and transparency at the heart of your personalisation strategy

Ensuring honesty and transparency are woven into your firm’s digital personalisation strategy is essential for any good business.

Ensuring honesty and transparency are woven into your firm’s digital personalisation strategy is essential for any good business.

Speakers at Travolution’s first Digital Lunchbox event, hosted by Facebook and sponsored by d-flo and Intent Media last week, agreed building that trust was vital if customer friction points are to be ironed out.

Stephanie Uhlig, managing director UK at eDreams ODIGEO, Dan Robb, director of digital marketing at Tui Travel and Alex Robinson, strategic partnerships manager at HotelTonight discussed how to drive loyalty through optimising the customer experience.

Uhlig said: “We have our own inventory but we’ll supplement that by bringing in what’s happening in other spaces and helping to drive out our clicks.

“Having information like this on our site I think improves trustworthiness of a company and improves people’s confidence by showing our own confidence in our product.

“It’s okay to say ‘you can buy things elsewhere’, but convey that you want them to buy with you and you want their loyalty.”

Robb said Tui saw a jump in conversion rates when it decided to include TripAdvisor reviews on its site.

“It happened almost immediately,” he said. “Even with bad reviews, the very fact you are putting on something like that, which is honest, is important.”

Ben Riggle, Intent Media EMEA director of sales, added: “From our perspective it’s all about transparency and trust in the industry.

“We talked a bit about Google moving into the space that OTAs are occupying now, so there’s the risk of the OTAs being disintermediated by Google, whereas in the past the pendulum was swinging the other way.

“We think you can do that by providing pricing and other options on the side, people interacting through your site, even if they are not booking with you, can be valuable.”