Comment: Why tech skills and talent are vital to personalise at scale

Dana Dunne, Chief Executive of eDreams ODIGEO, says personalisation will require travel companies to retain and develop technical know-how

Dana Dunne, Chief Executive of eDreams ODIGEO, says personalisation will require travel companies to retain and develop technical know-how 

In 2022, personalisation will continue to be key in the travel industry. But what makes it so important?

It is crucial because it enables customers to save a significant amount of time – potentially taking days or weeks of trip research right down to minutes or seconds.

The fact is that customers now expect it – it’s no longer a ‘nice to have’.  If you don’t offer customers a personalised experience, they will go elsewhere.

In fact, a McKinsey report found that 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalised interactions and 76% get frustrated when this doesn’t happen.

Ensuring you take your personalisation strategy seriously is essential.

When it comes to personalisation, online travel businesses must rely on technology. Only by developing your technology will you be able to offer a truly personalised experience.

Artificial Intelligence enables businesses to achieve personalisation at great scale, delivering personalised experience at every step of the consumer journey, to thousands if not millions of customers at once.

We serve more than 60 million user searches every day, resulting in more than nine billion different itineraries, so AI and machine learning is absolutely critical to us to enable us to provide our customers with the options best tailored to their individual needs.

Businesses need to ensure they have the right technology in place to ‘personalise at scale’, while also keeping an eye on new technology being developed that can help refine and improve what they have.

Continuously growing and maintaining this cutting-edge innovation requires highly skilled employees.

Therefore, identifying and retaining the top tech talent should also be an essential part of your personalisation strategy.

Businesses should keep up to date with trends in personalisation so they can best utilise new technologies and ideas ahead of their competition.

It’s important to have people in the business who can predict or keep an eye on what’s next, and leadership who can incorporate this into the business’s strategy.

McKinsey says that brands will use ecosystems to personalise journeys end-to-end over the next few years.

This will mean that the personalisation a customer experiences on their holiday may not end when they arrive at their hotel, but continue to expand into partner ecosystems with, for example, what they do when they’re at their destination and the restaurants that they choose to eat out at.

This is something that could prove really exciting for any travel business and having people within the business that know how to capitalise on this is really key.

We’re excited to see how personalisation evolves in 2022, and what technologies and trends can be utilised by the travel sector.