Modern travelers crave more than just a destination—they seek memorable experiences, seamless journeys, and personalized connections. Businesses must adapt to meet these growing expectations, ensuring every touchpoint along the customer journey is smooth and engaging.
Delivering exceptional guest experiences requires more than traditional methods. Centralized communication, unified data insights, and streamlined digital solutions are essential for brands aiming to stand out.
This article explores how Brevo’s innovative approach empowers travel and tourism companies to meet these demands, fostering stronger customer relationships and long-term loyalty.
What is tourism marketing?
Tourism marketing involves strategies travel-related businesses employ to promote destinations, services, and experiences. Its main goal is to attract and retain tourists by highlighting unique offerings, building brand awareness, and fostering long-term relationships. Effective tourism marketing can also play a crucial role in boosting local economies, preserving culture, and promoting good travel practices.
Evolving trends in travel and tourism
01: The rise of omnichannel guest expectations
Modern travelers expect brands to communicate with them on their preferred channels—email, SMS, WhatsApp, live chat, etc. This demand for flexibility calls for an omnichannel communication strategy that engages customers where they feel most comfortable.
Successful brands are those that can provide consistent, real-time interactions across these channels, ensuring that guests feel valued and understood throughout their journey.
Challenges of fragmented communication
Many travel and tourism companies face challenges due to disconnected communication channels. Fragmented guest communications can lead to delays, misunderstandings, and, ultimately, guest dissatisfaction.
Furthermore, sending generic, impersonal messages often fails to create meaningful connections, leaving customers feeling like just another number in the database.
Solution: all-in-one marketing platforms
Brevo’s all-in-one marketing solution empowers businesses to manage multiple channels from a single interface, ensuring consistency and real-time responsiveness. Brevo enables advanced automation and micro-segmentation, allowing brands to send targeted messages based on guest preferences and behaviors.
Customer success story: Suntransfers, a leading airport transfer company, enhances customer engagement and conversions with Brevo’s all-in-one marketing platform.
“With Brevo, we have optimized our email campaigns and streamlines our CRM processes. This has enabled us to create great customer experiences and significantly increase engagement.” Tom Spoelstra, Head of CRM at Suntransfers.
Omnichannel use case
A boutique hotel chain can engage guests through:
- Email booking reminders with personalized recommendations for local tours and dining options.
- Geofenced mobile wallet notification upon guest arrival, offering an exclusive discounted room upgrade or spa treatment for the first evening—encouraging upsells.
- SMS follow-up after checkout, prompting guests to leave a review with a link to the feedback page and a special discount code for future stays.
A unified approach not only streamlines internal operations but also improves guest satisfaction by delivering the right message at the right time and through the right channel. This ensures that brands remain relevant and responsive in an industry where customer expectations are rapidly evolving.
Emerging trend: The role of travel agencies and tour operators is evolving, with many adopting social media and influencer marketing as part of their core marketing efforts. These channels enable real-time engagement, expanding reach to new demographic groups.
Further reading: 8 Influencer Outreach Email Templates That Get Responses
02: Unifying data for scalable personalization
Importance of unified data in tourism
Travel and tourism companies inherently collect significant customer data, including booking information, contact details, preferences, and stay history. It is crucial to keep this data secure, comply with regulations, and leverage it responsibly for targeted marketing campaigns.
Expert tip: Aligning SEO with content marketing in data-driven campaigns can improve visibility on search engines, attracting potential customers seeking specific travel experiences.
Why fragmented data holds brands back
Personalization has become a key driver of guest satisfaction in travel and tourism. Guest information is often scattered across booking platforms, loyalty programs, customer feedback systems, and social media interactions. This siloed data results in disconnected information streams that impede seamless and tailored interactions with potential travelers.
Fragmentation restricts the overall effectiveness of marketing strategies, making it challenging for these companies to engage with customers on a more individual level.
Solution: Intelligent customer data platforms (CDPs)
What is a CDP
A customer data platform (CDP) helps you organize and consolidate customer data from various sources. Be it data from in-store and online purchases, website browsing behavior, app usage, or phone complaints, a CDP standardizes this data and brings it together in one central platform, eliminating data silos.
Brevo’s CDP also offers intelligent ID matching and standardized deduplication, breaking down data silos and transforming fragmented information into cohesive profiles. This eliminates redundant messaging and ensures that guests receive communications tailored to their needs.
The result is a complete, 360-degree view of the customer, allowing you to develop personalized marketing campaigns precisely tailored to the needs of your target audience.
CDPs are the future of personalized travel experiences. With a holistic, 360-degree perspective of the customer, brands can craft hyper-personalized marketing campaigns based on accurate insights produced by the CDP into traveler preferences, behaviors, and purchase histories.
Further reading: Navigating the Data Revolution: David Raab on CDPs and AI
Brevo's CDP
CDP best practices
Hyper-personalization is more than addressing guests by name; it’s about anticipating needs and delivering value at every stage of the customer journey. With Brevo’s CDP, brands can:
- Score contacts using key values like Purchase Timing Deviation (PTD) and RFM analysis to understand customer behaviors.
- Segment audiences based on detailed parameters, such as web activity, purchase history, and communication preferences.
- Personalize campaigns for these segments you created by offering tailored promotions, such as complimentary upgrades for frequent luxury travelers or family discounts for vacation planners.
According to McKinsey, 71% of consumers expect personalized experiences, and 76% feel frustrated when they don’t receive them.
Customer success story: Auchan Voyages increased direct marketing sales by 33% thanks to better customer data management, enabling more personalized campaigns that resonated with their target audience.
03: Experiences that drive loyalty
Loyalty is deeply intertwined with the travel and tourism industry which underlines every aspect of the experience. From the moment travelers begin planning their journeys, rewards, and incentives shape their choices—be it selecting an airline, booking accommodations, or choosing activities at their destinations.
The loyalty challenge in modern travel
Loyalty in the travel and tourism industry goes well beyond rewards programs; it is founded on providing seamless and memorable experiences that encourage guests to return. However, many businesses face challenges in retaining customers due to fragmented booking processes, disconnected travel documents, and inconsistent engagement throughout the journey.
For instance, a traveler might book a flight through one platform, reserve a hotel via another, and use a third app to manage loyalty points. This fragmented experience disrupts continuity and reduces the likelihood of repeat business.
Additionally, without the ability to instantly communicate updates, promotions, or loyalty rewards, businesses risk losing visibility in the customer’s mind. This gap in real-time interaction can lead to disengagement, missed upselling opportunities, and reduced brand loyalty.
Mobile-first solutions
Mobile users generated nearly 68% of all online traffic in the travel and hospitality segment in 2023, making mobile solutions indispensable for the travel industry.
As smartphones become central to travel planning and execution, mobile wallets have emerged as a powerful tool to unify the customer journey. They enable travelers to store boarding passes, hotel reservations, loyalty cards, and promotional offers all in one place—eliminating the need for multiple apps and platforms.
With Brevo’s mobile wallet, businesses can:
- Provide real-time updates: Keep guests informed with flight changes, booking reminders, and exclusive offers directly on their mobile devices.
- Offer seamless bookings: Store all travel-related documents in one digital wallet, making the entire journey frictionless.
- Centralize loyalty opportunities: Add loyalty cards, vouchers, and personalized offers to encourage repeat bookings and deeper customer relationships.
- Enable targeted engagement: Trigger automated notifications based on customer behavior, location, or preferences, enhancing personalization.
Loyalty use cases
- Geofenced notifications: Send location-based messages, such as a welcome note when a guest arrives at their hotel or reservations for the in-house restaurant.
- Tactical promotions: Push time-sensitive offers to travelers, like last-minute upgrades or discounted tours.
- Customizable digital passes: Personalize digital passes and loyalty cards to align with brand identity while offering functional convenience to guests.
Customer success story:
Corsair, a leading airline, digitizes travel documents and loyalty cards through Brevo’s mobile wallet solution. Corsair customers can now access boarding passes, track loyalty points, and receive personalized offers—all without downloading additional apps. This seamless experience significantly improved customer satisfaction and loyalty retention rates.
“Thanks to the wallet, Corsair customers can find all their travel documents in one place on their smartphone, offering a seamless travel experience” Julien Ballout, Digital Factory Manager, Corsair
Conclusion
The travel and tourism industry thrives on delivering seamless, memorable experiences. In an era where guest expectations are higher than ever, staying ahead requires more than just traditional approaches.
- Centralized communication
- Unified data insights
- Mobile-first strategies
These have all become the pillars of success for businesses aiming to build long-term customer relationships.
With Brevo, travel and tourism companies can unify communication channels, harness guest data for hyper-personalization, and offer seamless mobile experiences that foster deep customer loyalty. These strategies not only streamline operations but also enhance guest satisfaction and retention.
Discover new tourism marketing strategies in Brevo’s Blueprint for Success in Travel and Tourism.
