In the travel industry, traditional marketing strategies are simply becoming less effective. Travelers increasingly seek tailored experiences that resonate with their unique preferences and needs and tell their story in a captivating way. So it’s no surprise a growing number of travel brands are leveraging Personalized Video at scale.
Personalized Video offers an innovative solution to dried out marketing mechanisms, enabling travel and hospitality companies to deliver bespoke content that captures imagination and inspires wanderlust. By harnessing the power of data and advanced video technology, travel brands can create compelling narratives that speak directly to individual customers, fostering a deeper connection and driving brand loyalty.
As the competition in the travel sector intensifies, leveraging Personalized Video is no longer a luxury, but a necessity, for companies aiming to stand out and thrive in a crowded marketplace.
Here’s how Personalized Video benefits travel companies like yours, what it takes to deliver winning content and where customer engagement is headed in the world of travel.
In Travel, Personal Content Wins
The reality of Next Generation Video is that it works well for all kinds of travel companies since video is the most effective way to communicate and engage all audiences.
The reason video is such a great fit for the travel industry specifically is because it’s a powerful tool when it comes to creating an emotional response — the thrill of your next adventure, the fond memories of that trip you took last year, how it changed you. You can say, or rather show, all that in a Personalized Video in a way that’s much more compelling and memorable than text or even a photo.
So how do you know if your company should be using Personalized Video at scale?
Our clients have used Personalized Video for a variety of key moments in their customer journey, from acquisition to fun, shareable end-of-year recaps, all the way to reengaging churned customers. There are so many opportunities to build loyalty and deliver outstanding personalized experiences in the travel industry using Personalized Video.
Just think: When you check into a hotel, would you rather see your name written on a blank TV screen as your “welcome,” or would you prefer a video made especially for you, welcoming you and sharing personalized recommendations for your stay? After all, it is a TV, and those are generally used for viewing videos…
Benefits of Using Personalized Videos
The short answer is that Personalized Video simply works. Our clients in the travel space generally see uplifts of 5x-10x in conversions when comparing their Personalized Video campaigns to text-based or even image-based emails.
In fact, Personalized Video is also far more effective than “regular” video, according to consumers. The independent market study we run every year consistently shows that Personalized Video is over 3x more likely to build loyalty and 4x more likely to make a customer feel valued by a brand. That’s key in the travel industry.
Another benefit is explaining complex information. Consumers are actually 3.5x as likely to prefer a video from a brand explaining complex details (like check in instructions, which many travelers may be unfamiliar with now that everything is digital, for example). For travel brands, customer experience is everything, and Personalized Video helps achieve that.
One example of a travel brand upleveling customer experience through individualized video is Japan Airlines, which used our Next Generation Video Platform to share real-time flight information for travelers via video, like walk time to gate, weather at the destination and more.
Another example is Accor, which shared an important membership update to users via Personalized Video, including the specific date of the membership changes and what the changes entail. Check out the video below.
As for the commitment required to deliver best-in-class Personalized Video through the Idomoo platform, we offer a SaaS service, meaning contracts are typically measured in years. However, we have no hard limits on this, and in some cases a brand engages us for a shorter time or for a specific need — for example, communicating an important one-off event like the merging of two loyalty programs. In other words, we’re flexible.
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Personalized Video From Start to Finish
There are two steps involved in the Personalized Video creation process: the creation of a master video and the creation of the personalized variants of that video, one for each recipient.
AI isn’t required for either of these steps, but it can be used to improve speed and lower costs.
The master video is typically prepared either by the brand’s agency or by our own in-house agency. The creation of the Personalized Videos themselves is done automatically and in real time on our cloud platform.
Pro tip: If the brand wants these personalized variants to follow a strict script, AI is probably not the best fit. But if the brand wants to add some AI-driven creativity to the Personalized Videos (while still adhering to brand guidelines), they can now do that too.
Regardless of whether you proceed with AI or not, the reality remains that people don’t like reading text-based communications. That’s even more true for younger generations, which is why 89% of Gen Z and millennials say they want to get more video from brands, compared to 81% for all age groups.
Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman discussed in his 2011 book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” how text is processed through the slow and lazy part of our brain while audiovisuals are processed through the fast part of our brain, just like emotions. This makes people far more likely to emotionally engage with video content.
Combining personalized customer data with the world’s most engaging digital medium (video) is something we’ve been doing for years. We’ve worked with well over a dozen leading travel brands including airlines like American AIrlines and Delta Air Lines, cruise lines like Celebrity Cruises, hotels and resorts like Fairmont and Vale Resorts, hospitality leaders like Disney and OTAs like Trivago. These companies use our Next Generation Video Platform to drive millions of dollars in incremental sales and to strengthen customer loyalty. For these companies and more, personalization and video are a natural pairing.
Here’s an example of Personalized Video for Celebrity Cruises, who used it to follow up with a recent guest, remind them of their Elite Plus Member benefits and share updates on upcoming destinations and a brand-new ship. Plus, they used it as an opportunity to plug stellar deals, including half off for a guest and included roundtrip airfare for longer journeys.
Here’s another example from Delta Air Lines, which shared a video similar to “day in the life” content, but it’s much more engaging. See how it’s personalized with the individual traveler’s miles flown, business trips taken and number of cities and countries visited over the course of the year.
It ends by showing the customer how many miles they banked for future use, prompting them to think about booking more trips with those miles.
See how influential one Personalized Video is for a customer? Just imagine how effective an entire marketing strategy rooted in video — and personalized, at that — can turn out to be.
People are far more likely to engage with video content in experiential marketing, too. We have had clients in several industries incorporate Personalized Video into physical properties like stores or on physical mailers using QR codes. The travel industry is a great candidate for this sort of implementation, as there is almost always a screen around — on the plane, in the hotel, on the cruise ship, almost everywhere, it seems.
However, so far these screens haven’t been leveraged to deliver this sort of experience, which is a real miss. Who will be the first to do it in the travel space?
The Future of Customer Engagement in Travel
Data-driven video is the future of customer engagement in the travel industry. Next Generation Video can not only be personalized but also fully interactive, creating a two-way conversation with the viewer. Customers can engage with interactive elements inside the video (by clicking a CTA button or a hotspot, for example), jump around between chapters, share their video on social from the player or even enter their own inputs into the video, also straight from the player (like typing in a response or uploading an image, for example).
Video is proven to work, and it’s what customers want — 81% of people say they’d like to receive more video content from the brands they do business with, while only 30% say that they sometimes or often receive videos from brands. That’s a huge video gap that represents a massive opportunity for travel brands.
One possible explanation for this gap is that video is still relatively costly and complicated to deploy, but thanks to the AI video tools at our disposal today, that no longer has to be the case. With the lowering of the barriers to producing video content, we fully expect to see brands jump on the opportunity to close this gap.
The metrics from Idomoo’s travel clients speak to this, as Personalized Video has created very quantifiable value in the travel space. Some of the results reported by our travel clients include:
- 6x uplift in revenue per email sent with Personalized Video
- 4.9x uplift in retention
- 10x uplift in response rate
- 135% improvement in CTA rate
- 8x uplift in CTR
Even though video is just one element of an omnichannel effort for travel companies to boost guest experience across all the touchpoints they frequent, it’s clearly a pivotal one.
What’s Next for Personalized Video in Travel
The main pending assignment for Personalized Video in the travel space: leveraging the screens that are installed on planes, in hotel rooms and on cruise ships. There are no inherent technical reasons that are preventing this from happening, and it would be a huge upgrade to the traveler experience because, as mentioned, Personalized Video is shown to drive engagement, trust and brand loyalty.
Another change we see coming is AI-driven. Brands can now empower their employees to easily generate on-brand videos using AI for any use case — from following up after a call center interaction or business meeting to onboarding new employees and anything in between. This can truly revolutionize how brands use video to engage their customers and drive loyalty.
In an industry where the most engaging and individualized content prevails, Personalized Video stands out as a powerful tool for travel companies. The benefits are manifold, from enhancing customer engagement and satisfaction to driving higher conversion rates and fostering brand loyalty. As technology advances, the potential for Personalized Video in the travel industry will only grow, offering exciting possibilities for brands to connect with travelers on a personal level like never before.
Idomoo keeps customers on the cutting edge with its full-stack open platform that adds a human touch to every interaction. See where it can take you today.
