Enhance Experiential and Luxury Travel Messaging

Luxury Travel Needs Elevated Messaging

When customers are splurging on a luxury experience, they want every element of the trip to feel easy, breezy, and elevated—and that includes the marketing they receive. In fact, 43% of travelers associate innovative technology and amenities with a dream vacation.

To meet that expectation, marketers need to prioritize three things in their digital communications: personalization, convenience, and targeted resources that enhance their trip. Discover how leading travel and hospitality brands like Accor, Global Hotel Alliance, Hawaiian Airlines, IHG, JetBlue, and Virgin Voyages deliver this with their content, all through the ease of automation.  

Personalization From Head to Toe

Personalization is a pillar in most marketers’ strategies. However, choosing the right personalization tactic for your specific goal is also critical. While a live poll might drive clicks, it may not be the most suitable choice for strengthening loyalty, for example. IHG kept this in mind when they chose a strategic behavioral data play to drive upsells.

In their pre-stay email, IHG’s API displayed available upsell offers that automatically updated based on the user’s existing confirmation information. Each offer linked to a unique landing page crafted for upsell offers, making an additional purchase a frictionless process.

When travelers aren’t booking a new trip, it can be more challenging to find ways to engage them. But with personalization, marketers can take the opportunity to build loyalty and strengthen existing customer-brand relationships. Global Hotel Alliance did this expertly with their gamified year-in-review campaign.

Using a combination of merge tags and targeting rules, Global Hotel Alliance highlighted customers’ individual stats such as their current loyalty tier, number of nights stayed, and reward dollars earned that year. Using preference data, they also created seven different language versions to match each of their customer’s regions.

To finish off the year-in-review, a scratch-off that led to a “spin-the-wheel” page gave customers an opportunity to win bonus loyalty points. Customers loved this campaign, and the team at Global Hotel Alliance saw 56,109 total clicks, a significant lift from the year prior. 

Convenience Is King

From real-time displays to ancillary offers, there are countless ways to emphasize convenience. But providing a strong mobile experience is the most critical. After all, travelers won’t be breaking out their laptops every time they want an update; they’ll be checking their mobile devices.

JetBlue knew this and ensured that their Fall Merch campaign deployed across both email and mobile. In their rich push notification, the JetBlue team displayed two separate price points dynamic to each customer based on origin airport, destination airport, and travel date. 

The first price point reflected real-time pricing for a one-way fare, and the second displayed bundled pricing for flights and hotels. By providing relevant information at customers’ fingertips, JetBlue saw an 11% increase in direct opens within their app.

Accor took a similar approach for their seasonal promotions and saw a 4% increase in click-through rate as a result.

By incorporating time-sensitive personalization, messages were automatically adjusted to each recipient’s local time zone. The team paired this with interactive elements, such as personalized name overlays and animated countdown timers, to capture attention and prompt quick action. For recipients that didn’t convert through the initial send, Accor sent follow-up messages featuring alternate promotions tailored to each customer. 

Targeted Experiences

For many travelers, engaging with the destination’s culture, nature, history, and unique characteristics is the goal of the trip. They want to feel immersed in the experience and local community rather than a tourist parachuting into a new region. 

However, it can be daunting for a traveler to know where to start, which opens up the perfect opportunity for marketers to swoop in and lend a helping hand. By recommending experiences, restaurants, hotels, and more that add to the trip, travelers can get a leg up in creating their dream itinerary.

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Hawaiian Airlines helped their flyers enhance their trips by launching a dynamic map in their emails that highlighted the inter-island travel available. Depending on the starting destination of the traveler, the map provided a customized visual journey to show the easiest way to hop from island to island. Customers found this map to be a huge help, resulting in a 9% lift in click-through rate.

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Virgin Voyages created 500 itinerary card variations, each complete with recommended locales and hotel recommendations for sailors. This one-of-a-kind experience was made scalable with real-time prices and currencies that automatically updated without any extra lift from the Virgin Voyages team.

Stay in Step With Customers From Lift-Off to Touchdown

Marketers using these steps can elevate any luxury trip to a dream experience, encouraging customers to book their next trip before the last one is even over.

Explore the content personalization engine behind these winning campaigns, or read the related resources below to learn more.