Hospitality Management
Article | August 28, 2023
Data science has lead to marvelous opportunities for many industries. Like so many other industries, the travel industry would greatly benefit from knowing future travel information in advance. Fortunately, there is no need to rely on some fortunetellers anymore, but take advantage of Big Data.
Big Data in the travel industry is driving in the right direction, especially after the pandemic, as companies had to be more technologically advanced to cater to their regular operations effortlessly. And big data is now transforming the way businesses used to conduct their operations. It has started taking care of everything that a traveler expects from the traveling organizations in terms of personalized offers to products and more. In this digital period, where everything is hyperconnected, new technologies and big data analysis have become essential for the travel industry to adopt new consumption models and improve the decision-making process.
Many industry leaders are already using big data in the travel industry. Still, but you may not understand the real value it can provide for your business or how is big data being used in the travel industry. With a closer look at the ways big data is transforming the travel industry, you can determine how your business can benefit from its use. Before you reach this point, a brief about significant big data challenges in the travel industry can help you understand how you can improve your company.
What were Big Data Challenges?
Data capture
Unorganized structure of data
Speed
Privacy and security
Data ownership
Data handling
Data storage
5 Ways Big Data is being Used in Travel Industry Businesses
So how exactly is big data going to affect your company? Amadeus's research study identifies two segments of change, one is the operations, and the other is marketing strategies.
Greater Personalization
Companies in the travel industry, such as car rental companies, tour operators, airlines, and more, must find a way to improve their overall functionalities to meet goals. To stand out, you must have a unique approach to market your products. Using big data, you can easily pinpoint exactly what employees are looking for and then establish a concrete base right out of the gate. When it comes to greater personalization offerings, effective uses of big data analytics help making well-informed decisions. By using big data analytics, the applications provide wide-ranging personalization offerings such as promotions, deals, referrals, and more, keeping an aim to generate revenue.
Identification of Potential Risks
Currently, businesses are struggling to deal with high-risk environments, where a proper risk management process is the need of the hour. Big data in the travel industry has been instrumental in developing new risk management solutions and can enhance the effectiveness of risk management models and build intelligent strategies. This is one potential power of big data is transforming the travel industry.
Pricing strategies
Price is a critical component to set under marketing strategies. Big data used by travel companies can easily track, analyze, and file the competitors’ prices to get a clear picture of what’s trending. This real-time analytics can help your company track pricing changes and build a consistent pricing strategy for a better workflow for employees. Price strategies can turn into a game-changer for your business goals in the future. Through a transparent idea of what competitors are implementing in their process, your business can execute optimum pricing strategies that would considerably benefit your company by predicting future demand.
Security Enhancements
As the amount of online transactions has amplified steadily over the years, the rate of fraud has also increased simultaneously. Losing customer data can destroy your business’s reputation. Big data in the travel industry allows companies to plan and implement software that would increase safeguards on sensitive information by leveraging types of technologies, including natural language processing, video recognition, speech recognition, machine learning engines, and automation. This is considered one of the best solutions for how big data is helping the travel industry.
Revenue Management
Travel businesses use big data analysis to manage their revenue. Big data in the travel industry has become one essential part of companies that effectively maximizes financial aspects. If you have set a goal in your company to achieve specific revenue, then it is crucial to define a market strategy to offer corporate travelers the right services through the right channel. Because of this, you can manage the prices to maximize the revenue of your company.
Benefits of Big data
From a humble beginning of big data in tourism before the pandemic, it has become a mainstay in the business world. Big data solutions and big data analytics will not only foster taking data-driven decision, but also empower your workforce that add value to your business. According to Harvard Business Review, 99% of companies surveyed reported that they intend to implement big data analytics and AI in the near future. What are other significant big data benefits that you should inculcate it in your business? Here are some of these:
Big data benefits for the travel industry by offering real-time monitoring, forecasting of business, and the market.
Unlock the true potential of data-driven marketing.
Facilitate faster delivery of services and products that meet and exceed the client’s expectation.
How Businesses can Analyze Big Data?
To understand big data, you firstly need to know the points that need solutions. Then, attempt to identify the answer to your questions such as, ‘how can I get the data to solve it?’ or ‘what can big data do for my business?’ Your big data solutions need to be effortless. It is important to match what you had in mind for pricing and make it flexible to serve your business in the future.
Research the most reliable big data tool so that it can serve to provide you the right solution. For example, if you want to introduce more effective promotions and marketing campaigns, you can use Canopy Labs, to predict big data travel behavior and sales trends.
The travel and tourism industry uses big data with the help of several tools that are inexpensive or even free to use. Google also has user-friendly tools like Google Adwords and Google BigQuery. So, don’t feel overwhelmed by all the data that’s out there. With the right tools, you can separate the data to find what you need to start growing your business today!
Some Success Stories
KAYAK sets an example of using big data in the travel industry by innovation and spearheads the technological revolution. It has developed a new benchmark in the travel industry using big data for travel management and operations.
United Airlines embraced a “collect and analyze” approach to their big data for travel planning. The company tracks all information using real-time data, including individual and general historical data.
The Schiphol Group, which operates the airport, has reportedly invested in data science packages. A team of big data analysts easily analyze, report, and visualize the constant influx of data of employees on corporate trips.
These developments are reflective of the growing big data analytical trends in the travel and tourism industry. Following the steps of industry leaders, a lot of companies have started the adoption of big data for travel management and improvising their analytical tools to make more informed decisions for future travel mechanism. You can get more interesting and updated news to rely on how big data in the travel industry is transforming.
Future Outlook of Big Data in Travel Industry
Many industry leaders are talking about big data in the travel industry, its evolving benefits and the future of big data within the tourism industry. With the effective uses of big data, your company can use information about employees catering to corporate business services to understand the workflow.
Hadoop, one of the big data applications in the travel industry, provide suffecient data storage space and presents information from a wide range of sources in a structured manner. It enables tourism companies to take immediate decisions as per requirements. Big Data applications in the travel industry help companies introduce new products to have predictive analysis and critical insights about corporate travelers.
What could be anticipated from the future of big data is that travel industry professionals will progressively utilize big data to facilitate their potential benefit. This will genuinely modify what companies would offer corporate travelers equally in the future. With such activities to cater the markets worldwide, big data in the travel industry has formed a clear map.
Frequently Asked Questions
How is big data being used in the travel industry?
Big data in the travel industry is used to observe various marketing strategies and some customer-related patterns and trends. Following these is important to create loyalty among employees as well as customers also. Therefore, the more data a business collects, the more it will understand ways to generate revenue.
What is the future of big data in travel industry?
The future of big data in the travel industry stays impressive as the market leaders can make decisions that are more informed based on analytics and number-driven data. Big data in the future will boost the efficiency of the services and the quality at the same time.
How big data is helping the travel industry?
Big data is helping the travel industry in many ways. It is allowing businesses to make more evidence-driven decisions for revenue. These include the ability to anticipate customers' future demands accurately, re-structure pricing, target more marketing strategies, and improve real marketing tricks.
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Hospitality Management
Article | June 19, 2023
In 2020, the number of suspected online travel fraud attempts in the U.S. jumped by 136.6%. Two years later, the online travel fraud “industry” is still going strong, making online travel agencies and tourism businesses lose their money and reputation.
"Traveling has always been when people are more vulnerable. A few hundred years ago, the perpetrators were pirates or highwaymen. Now those criminals are still out there, but they've changed their methods to focus on digital attacks instead."
-Caleb Barlow, ex-Vice President of X-Force Threat Intelligence at IBM Security.
Mitigating fraud risk is important in any industry, but it is especially important in industries like travel where competition is fierce and margins are shrinking. The high resale value of its digital goods makes the travel industry vulnerable to fraud.
Fortunately, advanced solutions that prevent fraud have shown great results in the airline and travel industries. Machine learning and artificial intelligence tools are improving in efficiency. With their help and a variety of other methods, a good travel fraud prevention team can curb fraud in the travel industry, increase profit margins, and cut down on the costs and time taken for manual reviews of transactions to prevent financial losses.
How are Online Travel Agencies Mitigating Fraud Risks and Safeguarding Revenue?
Online travel agencies need to be on their toes to preserve their revenue and reputation, and the integrity of their operations to grow and sustain their businesses. Modern online fraud prevention methods can protect you from fraud without jeopardizing the customer experience. Let us look at these methods:
Implementing Machine Learning-based Solutions
Machine learning-based models can be the backbone of your fraud protection strategy. These models can recognize patterns and predict outcomes. They help you identify anomalies in customer behavior in real time, flag an account-takeover attempt, analyze transaction riskiness, and block them before they result in a chargeback. ML-based fraud detection software like Signifyd and Riskified detects illegitimate activities related to payments, account creation, purchases, and chargebacks. They monitor websites, networks, and applications for fraud and prevent digital payment fraud.
It is important to remember that you need to strike a good balance between these preventive measures and your customer experience, so you do not lose business by focusing on only one aspect.
Transaction Monitoring
This method focuses on the credit card used for booking. Using an intelligence tool, check if there is a mismatch between the user’s IP address and their billing information and if the same user is making too many bookings from the same account or same card. Combine these insights with user verification and fraud scoring tools so you can reject suspicious transactions automatically. Also, keep an eye on changes to bookings to avoid problems, and follow the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DS S) to make sure card payments are as safe as possible.
User Profiling
Gather important customer data like email addresses, credit card information, loyalty points, and social networking handles. Behavioral data on what the customer does on your website or your mobile app, the devices through which the customer connects to the website, and their email address or location can help prevent fraud. Additionally, online travel agencies can verify users in the following ways:
Use an address verification service (AVS) and a card security code (CVV or CVC). Verify scanned ID documents using SaaS products to add another layer of security to every transaction.
Create a blacklist to block specific users if you notice any suspicious attempts.
Use device fingerprinting to block devices previously associated with fraudulent activities.
Anti-ATO Methods
To prevent account takeover attempts, deploy two-factor authentication for travel agents, and 3D secure PIN codes for end customers. Biometric technology and mobile payment wallet apps like Google Pay, and Apple Pay can curb swindlers from getting into a customer’s account without secure pins or fingerprints.
Verify Suppliers
Set up a process for verifying every supplier before making any payments. Check their business license, business reviews on Google, and check their Google Street View to confirm if a hotel actually exists at the mentioned address. Ensure that there is no correlation between a steep increase in hotel prices and booking activity because it could be a hotel price spike scam.
Block Bot Attacks
Any kind of abnormal spike in web or app traffic can be an indication of a bot attack. Real-time protection against bots can be a great way to handle illegitimate traffic. Compare every website request against the in-memory pattern database using ML and AI to check and block bots swiftly. Implement networking that can safeguard your domains within milliseconds upon detecting a bad bot.
Control Friendly Fraud
Chargeback abuses are hard to prevent. The only way to fight back is to document compelling evidence to prove that the said transaction was legitimate. Document order forms, tracking numbers, online travel agency customer communication logs, any kind of travel product redemption evidence, and confirmation for items delivered to an address that matches with the address verification service (AVS).
Air France Sped Up Manual Reviews By 70%
Air France wanted an easy way to access reliable information on potentially risky transactions. So they chose SEON’s Intelligence Tool.
“The time spent by Air France analysts on manual reviews is down by an impressive 70%.”
- Eric Facquet, Deputy Manager of Fraud Prevention at Air France
Summing It Up
Tackle online travel fraud head-on while keeping in mind your end customer. You must protect your customers from fraud in a way that is strong, practical, and well-balanced. This way should cover the customer's entire journey with you, both literally and figuratively.
FAQ
Which software tools can help with fraud detection?
Fraud detection software tools such as SEON, ClickGUARD, Riskified and Oracle Adaptive Access Manager can help detect fraud.
How can you improve fraud detection?
Use machine learning models to automate processes for fraud investigation, and regularly update rules for detection and how to handle alerts.
What does fraud detection software do?
Fraud detection software regulates accounts, payments, purchases, and events in real-time to detect any fraudulent activities. It also protects sensitive company and customer data.
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Hospitality Management
Article | June 20, 2023
Over the past few days, I've looked at a few dozen travel industry predictor graphs, from a number of very credible sources. Below, I've compiled them all onto one graph to create the last predictor you need to understand for the next few weeks. I can say with almost certainty that one, or a combination of these is going to be quite accurate. What’s the point here? The point here is that there is no point. Nobody knows what will happen next week, never mind three years from now.
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Travel Technology
Article | May 27, 2022
Travel technology professionals view tech as the way to help travel come back stronger, according to research.
The TravelTech Show (formerly TTE Europe) polled buyers and suppliers who listed artificial intelligence, customer relationship management and online booking tools as the top three technologies to help boost recovery.
Rounding out the top five were self-service portals and innovative payment options.
The findings will be unsurprising to many in the industry already looking to AI, the cloud and other technologies to boost efficiency and improve the customer experience.
Brian Sheerin, managing director of SABS Travel Technologies, says: Allowing travelers to self-book through an OBT [online booking tool] while still providing simple methods to communicate, such as online chat, are key to reducing customer frustration and allowing travel businesses the space to restructure, to resource and to meet customer expectations. OBTs were already playing a massive part in booking travel pre-pandemic and now it is even more important in the role of rebuilding the sector and customer confidence in it.”In recent weeks, American Airlines announced a far-reaching partnership with Microsoft, Expedia Group unveiled its new tech platform Open World and Miami Airport announced its rollout of biometric boarding technology.
Payment developments and other advances in travel fintech also have been highlighted recently as an increasing priority to the industry as it looks to find new revenue streams.
The TravelTech Show research also quizzed participants on the top challenges facing the travel technology industry currently, with economic uncertainty taking the top slot (52%), followed by COVID-19 restrictions (46%) and climate change (36%).
Cyber security took fourth place compared to two years ago when it was in seventh place.
Meanwhile, sustainable travel moved to seventh place compared to the second-place spot it held in 2020.
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