Providing relevant content and notifying travelers at the right moment can make a great destination experience

This could be for example receiving a timely offer for a Star Wars exhibition in London, which I previously knew about but forgot when booking my flight, or an offer for ski lessons for my three daughters after having booked this year's ski trip. 

Now imagine destination service providers knew I found these offers highly relevant and pushed them to me at the right time - anticipating my leisure preferences for when I’m on holidays with the family, and my business preferences when I’m on the road in customer meetings and events. This would not only improve my overall trip experience significantly but leave me feeling much better served.

And I’m not the only one that would find such offers useful; 72% of travelers Amadeus recently surveyed in a global study on the topic say receiving proactive notifications about other ancillary services to complement their trip would be either valuable or very valuable to them. Travelers are looking for tangible guidance and relevant inspiration ahead of their arrival as well as tips to navigate their way around once they are in Destination X.

So how can providers know what I want before I know it myself? Thankfully, technology can ensure travelers don’t miss out - mobile is the perfect platform to reach them with tailored recommendations at the right moment.  At the same time, it allows travel sellers to learn about travelers' needs beyond air and hotel, while giving them simple, convenient access to branded offers and notifications within a single app. What’s more, as mobile users today we’re always connected and the personal footprint on our mobile devices is key to help travel sellers, among other providers, identify the services we want as individual travelers.

Valéry Bernard, CEO and founder, MyLittleAdventure

Essentially serving travelers based on their individual needs, be it for leisure or business, is key for any travel player to succeed. At the same time sellers should avoid the scattergun approach, which will negatively affect the post-booking experience and fundamentally the entire trip.

The right approach doesn’t necessarily involve increasing the number of push messages though. Rather, our findings show travel sellers should focus on pushing relevant content for each traveler. From our survey we know that 34% of leisure travelers book three or more destination services and that 33% say that complementary services “truly enhance their trip experience”. Clearly, travelers are hungry for rich experiences and at least one third of them base the overall travel experience on destination services during their journey. There is a huge task for travel sellers here to keep up with travelers’ perceptions, opinions and experiences in this space.

Ultimately, travel experiences should be as much stress and worry free as possible.  As shown by our recent insight paper, destination services can play a critical role in better serving travelers in the ancillary post booking game and improve the overall travel experience.

To find out more about our findings and recommendations on how to best help travelers in Destination X, visit amadeus.com/DestinationX, where you can download our insight paper, view our infographic and the 8 key trends extracted from our research.