My Travel Marketing Dilemma
I love the travel industry, I truly do, and like any beloved relationship this means an acceptance of its shortcomings. One of the parts of the business I find most unpalatable is the marketing and this is why I send out so little of it myself.
This has a downside because while I almost never verbalize such things, often, when people call or email I have thoughts like like:
“You want a river cruise? Why didn’t you let me know last month when one of the best lines was doing it’s 50th anniversary sale and had the best deals I’ve ever seen?”
“Safari? Why didn’t you call me last week when my favorite line of Safari lodges was offering an every fourth night free which could’ve saved you $15k over the three spots in Africa you just asked about.
Or,”you want to fly business class to Europe? Why didn’t you call me yesterday when booking 90 days out would’ve saved you $600?
And then I start thinking I should be blasting out every travel deal that comes across my desk, but only briefly. It’s the whole world and if I did that, my clients would have to spend hours every day looking through the needle in the haystack of that particular deal they actually want. Travel companies definitely want me to do that and if they could, they’d take me out of it and just blast you with information that all amounts to “buy this” and while there would be some things in there you would want, most of it, you wouldn’t. Not that it isn’t mostly all pretty good, it’s just so much of it.
This is why I take pains to isolate my client information away from traditional databases. Most of the most popular travel agent based CRMS have built into them powerful data harvesting tools. Those tools meant to go back to airlines, cruiselines, hotels and tour operators so they can be blasted with marketing materials in all forms.
I’ve never taken part in this, frankly, when I went to a seminar about the amount of information that can be learned about a person from just the information required for your average international travel I was horrified. Your income, your expenditures and how to really dial in marketing pinpointed right at you, personally. In the information age, this has found a bold frontier often making us wonder if our computers and cellphones are telepathically eavesdropping on us.
So, not only do I keep my client database off in a heavily encrypted format that wasn’t ever met for the travel industry (I do have a tool that securely translates into flight booking info) I also never share client info except as necessary to make bookings or if a client asks me too. I do hope that a new CRM/booking engine will come out that is actually useful and doesn’t have these data backdoors. It would make mylife a lot easier. I often think I should get some investors and develop one. I think that the internal databases at companies like Expedia have solved these problems and that bringing that down to the level of an individual agent is coming.
All of this is to say. How do I bring my clients what they want, when it will be at the highest value? I don’t know. I’m fantastic at ‘client qualification” but somebody has to reach out to me first for that and a good portion of the time, they are late.
I may put out a survey looking at how you are inspired to travel. How the nontravel professional gets dialed into different destinations is kind of a mystery to me. I sign up for trainings, get inundated with marketing and the basics of my job means researching these things continually. I feel like if I knew what was making people want to travel, I could maybe, just maybe actually send them some selected offers on things they actually want when they are at the greatest value.
If you read this, thanks, this is just me complaining about a situation I often find myself at odds with. I hope the next time you reach out to me with something you want to do, it will be just as an amazing deal, that is just perfect, comes out.
