The New Traveler Needs
Travel and Hospitality are not only one of the most basic service industries in the world but also one of the oldest. Ever since the inception of civil thought processes, we humans have always aspired to traverse our lands beyond the horizon no matter the challenges or the risks involved in the same. This is perhaps the greatest achievement of human beings as a race – being able to leave a mark on the lands that they set their foot on may it be the most distant islands, the highest mountains or the moon. It is necessary for the Travel and hospitality industry to look after modern travelers needs. Therefore, it’s safe to say that travel and hospitality will always be one of the core industries that influences all other spheres of human intervention. Fast forward to the 21st century, rapid developments in communication technology has enabled the world to come together in a manner that was quite unprecedented before. The farthest corners of the Earth have opened up as potential destinations due to the emergence of new markets and communities. With modern travelers having far more diverse needs than that of our ancestral counterparts, the travel and hospitality industry must be able to mould itself to cater to these growing needs and enable the expansion policies of modern businesses and communities alike. To properly understand the needs of new travelers, it is first necessary to define the modern traveler. So, who is the modern traveler? What sets these travelers apart from travelers back in the day? To properly answer this question, let’s take a look at the different types of travelers that we come across today! Based on behavior, motivation and psychology, we can more or less divide modern travelers into the following five essential types: The Plugged-In Traveler: Young millennials who are knowledgeable about their surroundings and prefer to plan trips independently rather than through travel agencies or agents. These travelers are progressive, tech-savvy and are well-versed with the road to make the most of the journey rather than the destination. The internet and the smartphone play a key role in their travel plan as they tend to more or less rely on these for all their needs during their trips. Digital Detoxers: These new set of travelers tend to live ‘off the grid’ while on holidays in an attempt to disconnect themselves from the growing pressures of their regular lives. They tend to rely on physical modes of transactions such as cash, book local transports to move around and take in the local culture as much as possible. However, they do rely on the internet and modern facilities during the planning stage of the trip. Adventure Seekers: Thrill seekers and adventurers are quickly becoming one of the leading groups of travelers. These travelers tend to travel around 4-5 times a year and prefers niche destinations to regular ones. Highly susceptible to word-of-mouth advertising, these groups of travelers are being increasingly targeted by travel agencies through alternative travel packages. They are open to new ideas and are not averted by danger as much as regular travelers. Family Holiday Makers: These travelers are extremely limited on time and therefore rely on third parties to plan and book their trips for them. They tend to travel more during on-seasons and are quite lenient when it comes to expenditures during their trip. Travel agencies target this group heavily since they bring in the most profits. Old-schoolers: The older age groups make up this segment. They are usually 45+ and not as tech-savvy as the other groups mentioned on this list. Old-schoolers are generally targeted through offline marketing campaigns such as print media and television as they do not spend extended hours on the internet. As it can be seen from above, modern travelers are extremely diverse depending on their needs and modes of travel. It is therefore mandatory that modern travel agencies or businesses working in the travel and hospitality sector understand the wide spectrum of needs and wants to be put forward by these groups to develop or incorporate essential technologies that can fulfil them effectively. Keeping that in mind, let us look at some of the needs of modern travelers, the things that they expect from travel agencies or entities involved in the trade: Efficiency: The ability of the travel agency or hospitality provider to cater to the needs of the travelers as efficiently as possible without wasting time. Modern travelers tend to be quite constricted on time and need to adhere to strict schedules, so the services must be provided to them as quickly and as efficiently as possible. Accessibility: A modern travel agency or a hospitality provider needs to be accessible to travelers worldwide. As technologies advance, people are relying on a plethora of them to cater to their everyday needs. Some might use online transactions, some might prefer cash, some might use UPIs for all their needs. Travel agencies and hospitality providers must make all of these facilities readily available to all groups so as not to lose out on potential customers. Visibility: A modern travel agency or hospitality provider needs to be visible to their target audience. With newer and emerging markets on the rise, the competition within the industry is also increasing exponentially. Therefore, travel agencies and hospitality providers need to make their services as visible as possible to potential customers. Optimizations on their marketing front such as SEO, SMO and digital marketing are only some of the ways that these companies in the industry are trying to make their services more visible to modern travelers. However, studies have also shown that businesses cannot rely solely on online presence alone. A proper visibility campaign should take into account both online and offline strategies to ensure maximum effectiveness. Affordability: As discussed above, different groups of travelers travel on different budgets. Therefore, travel agencies and hospitality providers must develop packages keeping in mind these different budgets. To target the maximum groups of travelers, packages need to be as diverse as the target
What’s the Importance of Mapping Speed in Hotel Mapping?
The hospitality distribution market is one of the most complex and largest among the other rival industries in a relative sense. For Hotels and OTA’s today, accurately merging multiple sources of data from suppliers is extremely challenging due to a lack of global standards. Managing a large database and providing the best hotel content to online users is one of the most tedious tasks when done manually due to the increments in data sets that companies need to work with regularly. Due to these large databases, the data displayed isn’t the same everywhere and can result in errors in booking all over the platform. At the centre of these challenges, the issue of tackling duplicate records stands as the most arduous task that needs to be addressed by modern global hotel OTAs, suppliers and distributors alike. To meet this need of the travel industry, travel technology companies are quickly starting to prove their worth. Travel tech companies are providing the industry with smart and intelligent solutions to give online users a seamless and hassle-free booking experience thus ensuring their retention in the long run. The technology that helps to resolve this issue of duplicate listings is called hotel mapping – a service that quickly identifies duplicates and ensures consistencies in hotel and room listings on any given platform. What is Hotel Mapping? Hotel mapping refers to the process of merging different property IDs from different suppliers into one unique property ID and providing users with unified and opinionated content. Duplication and inconsistency in hotel content usually occur when an OTA sources its data from different channels like the bed banks, GDSs, larger OTA’s, etc. that do not really conform to the same standard of distribution. Hotel Mapping is an excellent solution that adapts to online consumer needs. Hotel mapping can be done manually too but looking at the large databases that companies need to work with regularly today (that is constantly increasing) it can be an extremely tedious, time-consuming and labour-intensive process. To avoid this major problem of duplication and inconsistent listings, most of the OTA’s opt for automated hotel mapping platforms and aims to prevent the end-user from booking the wrong duplicate hotel. If you want to learn more about hotel mapping, we highly recommend going through this blog Hotel Mapping, where we delve into a much more detailed analysis of the topic. Does Mapping Speed matter in Hotel Mapping? In this fast-paced lifestyle and evolving travel businesses who wants to be a turtle in the race? Today, online users are searching for millions of properties every second and they want the best hotel rooms at the best prices within seconds. As a result, all suppliers and distributors in the ecosystem want to make sure that they can push the latest updated content of hotels in real-time for greater coverage. Today, over 148 million online travel bookings are made annually and for an OTA losing a customer due to poor online service can break their business. To overcome this pain point, most of the OTA’s are looking at automated hotel mapping software with high processing speed and accuracy so as to maintain consistencies across their platform. It is essential that the listings being made available to potential customers on online booking platforms are both accurate and updated so that the best possible properties can be displayed according to the search query. If multiple listings are present on a platform that relates to the same property, it ends up confusing the customer and results in incorrect bookings. Such incorrect bookings can not only incur losses but can seriously threaten the viability and damage the credibility of a brand over time. This pandemic has taught businesses to manage their finances smartly by not letting even a single user trickle through when it comes to conversions. In such a competitive market, giving users an easy and seamless booking experience has now become the most critical focus point for all OTAs. To provide users with fast and opinionated results, a fast hotel mapping tool is of utmost importance. Therefore, to answer the question, speed is definitely important and one of the most critical factors that contribute to the efficiency of any given system in the distribution network. We, at Vervotech, understand the importance of the role we tech companies play in the travel industry and we are constantly working towards bettering our products and services to better serve the travel businesses. Our AI-based hotel mapping API, Vervotech Mappings, leverage the power of machine learning to uniquely map hotel content with a 99.99% accuracy and can uniquely map hotels with a mapping speed of more than 3 million properties per day. Pretty cool, isn’t it? What’s cooler is the fact that we push updates multiple times a day with a coverage of over 98%! If you want to learn more about our hotel mapping software and the other services offered by Vervotech, visit us here for a guided showcase of our products.Vervotech Mappings is a leading Hotel Mapping and Room Mapping API that leverages the power of AI and ML to quickly and accurately identify each property listing through the verification of multiple parameters. With one of the industry’s best coverage of 98% and an accuracy of 99.999%, Vervotech Mappings is quickly becoming the mapping software of choice for all leading global companies operating in the travel and hospitality industry. To learn more about Vervotech Mappings and the ways it can enhance your business in the long run contact us: sales@vervotech.com
Great response after PR Newswire’s Press Release on the launch of our new product: NEXUS – a single API to connect to all suppliers
On 28th January 2019, we launched the jewel-in-our-crown, the ace-up-our-sleeve, the culmination-of-our-dreams, our first product: NEXUS– Hotel Aggregator API. It is a single API integration for travel agencies to connect to all suppliers and is the first of many innovative travel technology products to come forth from our very talented and dedicated team of young professionals. We decided to go with the most reputed of them all for our first ever Press Release – and turned to the renowned PR Newswire for the same. This press release was issued to the Indian market, as well as to MENA. MENA distributes PR Newswire’s copy to countries like Bahrain, Egypt, Israel, Jordon, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Yemen, Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. The icing on the cake? The response we received from the industry after the press release was phenomenal and it was a great feeling for the team – like winning the first of many many trophies on this journey of ours. So what does NEXUS promise? With all the major suppliers already pre-integrated and ready-to-use, NEXUS, developed with the cloud-first architecture, guarantees faster go-to-market, higher performance, scalability, and uptime. It can be used by travel companies of all sizes and solves the industry-wide problem of duplicate hotel inventory. Our Hotel Aggregator API- NEXUS also incorporates optimized search patterns across all suppliers to bring the best performance out of supplier APIs. Cutting-edge? Very surely! “At Vervotech, we believe that technology is the key enabler for businesses to maximize revenue and optimize expenses. With an innovative travel technology product like NEXUS, travel businesses can now offer comprehensive and relevant content to their customers in a faster, easier and more effective way,” said Sanjay Ghare, CEO at Vervotech Solutions. “Our product discovery started with a number of big-businesses which had signed up with us. This has helped us understand and overcome all kinds of ground-level challenges,” he added. To read the detailed press release, click here. To know more about NEXUS and our company, click here. It’s been an exciting couple of weeks for us here at Vervotech, and we look forward to sharing many more of these moments with you. We’re just getting started. Stay tuned! Vervotech Mappings is a leading Hotel Mapping and Room Mapping API that leverages the power of AI and ML to quickly and accurately identify each property listing through the verification of multiple parameters. With one of the industry’s best coverage of 98% and an accuracy of 99.999%, Vervotech Mappings is quickly becoming the mapping software of choice for all leading global companies operating in the travel and hospitality industry. To learn more about Vervotech Mappings and the ways it can enhance your business in the long run contact us: sales@vervotech.com
