The travel cycle of a customers

The travel cycle of a customer With new technology, the accessibility and affordability of
international travel, visitors to World Heritage sites immediately compare the grade of visitor
services and amenities on offer to that of other global private and public sector attractions and
destinations. Smart phones have become the indispensable travel companion, with 'connected
travellers' becoming the norm rather than the exception.

Visitors utilize their mobile phones to access the internet and social media. Visitors can interact
with friends and relatives and receive information in a timely and convenient manner via this
link.

Visitors utilize smart phones at every stage of the travel cycle, including navigating about the site and
region, booking excursions, hotels, and restaurants on site and nearby, identifying events, reading
reviews, and completing financial transactions and purchases.

Stage 1: Dreaming

Every holiday starts with a dream. An advert on TV; or a movie location may be the spark inspiration or
perhaps their itchy feet are telling them the world is calling. Regardless of how the idea entered your
head, you’re now starting to talk it over with your friends and family, casually tossing out the idea of
heading to the Aloha state in the next year. The seed has been planted…and it won’t take long for that
palm tree to grow.
So how does a hotel reach this dreamer in stage 1?
Email marketing: Reach out to your past guests with a well-timed email campaign. Hopefully, you’ve
made good use of your email collection Put an idea in their head.
Social media: Encourage past guests to share their experiences on your social media channels. The end of
their trip can be the spark that ignites the start of a future traveler’s trip. Expand your word-of-mouth
reach by encouraging your guests to share and interact with your communities online.
Blog about it: After a while, websites for hotels can get a little stale. There’s only so much new content
that can be run through the limited pages within the official brand site. Creating a blog allows you to
open the floodgates of possibilities for new and exciting content. Blog about top things to do in your city;
write about the amazing new restaurant that just opened up near your hotel.
The blog allows you to generate plenty of new content on a regular basis, and best of all, search engines
crawl this new content quickly, giving you plenty of opportunities to rank for new niche
keywords. AirRentalz has a group of professional writers that can assist you with writing strategic and
SEO friendly blogs for your post.

Stage 2: Planning

The customer is now in the planning stage where the statistics tell us, they’ll be visiting around 20
different websites in order to find the ‘perfect’ hotel.
According to Google, 66% of people spend time shopping around before booking travel. Search Engine
Optimisation is important to ensure your website rates higher than your competitors. Also take a look at
your local listings and optimise them on Google maps to make it easier for the customer to find you. Your
hotel is just one of many in a nebulous idea-cloud of potential destinations and locations. In fact, over the
course of this consumer’s travel cycle, he or she will have visited over 20 different travel websites in over
9 separate research sessions on the internet.

Stage 3: Booking

The jet-setter has now completed the first two stages of dreaming and planning and is ready to book their
dream holiday – hopefully with you! In the booking stage, it’s vital your website is easy to navigate and
your brand keywords are strong for when people are searching for your hotel name. Every hotel must be
discoverable especially within online channels. Consider using AirRentalz services, such as Booking
Button that can help make your hotel website your most profitable sales channel and own the guest
relationship at every stage of the customer journey – pre-, during and post-stay.
So how does a hotel reach this booker in stage 3?
Don’t make people think: Make your website or landing pages easy navigate and easy for users to reach
their goal. Usability is crucial to getting users on your site to convert to booking guests. If you make the
booking process too cumbersome or make it difficult for users to navigate your site, potential guests will
look elsewhere to book their vacation.
They’re in the home stretch of the buying funnel and it would be awful to work so hard to drive qualified
website traffic, only to lose the customer right before they cross the finish line.

Stage 4: Experiencing

The customer has chosen your hotel and while online marketing is important, the outcome of the
experience stage is largely reliant on the staff at the hotel and the experience the traveler has while
staying with you.
This is all about customer service and ensuring the person leaves with a smile on their face. Great
customer experience is critical for lots of reasons but also because happy customers will share their
experience online with their network.
Tie offline marketing with online marketing – Speaking of keeping consistency from the last point, make
sure that you are promoting your social media channels in the offline world at your property as well.

Stage 5: Sharing

Most people book accommodation on recommendations from friends and family. So whether your
customer posts a photo of the incredible views from their hotel balcony or takes the time to write a five-
star review of the hotel service, sharing the moments they had will encourage other travelers who are at
the dreaming stage to book with you.
By targeting your customer at each one of the five stages of travel not only will ensure your brand is with
them along their journey you’ll stand out from your competitors by enabling your customers to share their
experience with their extended peer network.
So how does a hotel encourage travelers to share their experiences in stage 5?
Tell them where to share: Similar to the final bullet in the previous stage, let guests know where they can
share their experiences. Hotels should have Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, TripAdvisor and other icons
present at the front desk, to alert guests that they can engage with your property and share their opinions
through those participating channels. Reward creative user-generated content: Host a contest at your hotel
that seeks to reward the guest who posts the funniest/wackiest/most entertaining photos/story/experience
about the hotel or the city on a social media channel of your choice.
The typical vacation planning and travel buying cycles are pretty complex. At its most basic, a typical
traveler’s path to vacationland can be broken down into 5 stages. Many people often think of online
marketing as simply selecting the right keywords and optimizing a website for those keywords in
Google. That is only a small piece of the pie. And you can never have a truly effective online marketing
campaign by only focusing on a single channel at a single point in a traveler’s buying cycle.
To neglect to target the user at the other stages of their buying process is to miss out on a huge
opportunity to digitally greet them at every step of the way to their purchase. In the end, properly
targeting potential guests at each of these 5 stages is crucial to ensuring that they not only book at your
hotel, but perpetuate that buying cycle for the next vacationer too!