This reaction paper is about PhocusWright webinar. I was not able to watch the full webinar anymore, so this reaction paper is based on the webinar slides. PhocusWright is a travel industry research authority. Their main interest is in customer, suppliers and intermediaries connection. The research of PhocusWright has been collected from Europe, North and Latin America and Asia. In this webinar they introduced their research of traveler digital journey and what travelers want and don’t want while being online. (PhocusWright 2017.)
Customer experience
Customer experience is always individual and important part of success. Digital customer experience happens online without any physical customer connection. Knowledge of customer needs and preferences in digital marketing is very important. It’s good to know typical online behavior when creating online content on behalf of a company for ex. use of caps lock may seem offensive.
3 reasons why travelers book offline
- There is too much of not personalized information, it’s time consuming, prices do change and there is lack of useful visuals.
- The need of personal service.
- Some of the questions were not answered by the website.
The struggle of online bookings
I was not surprised of the fact that nowadays people book travels more by mobile devices, so have I. I’m sure that most of us doesn’t even remember the last time we have opened a computer or laptop just to do online browsing. In my opinion booking a trip should be easy and go smoothly with any device used. I’m also easily annoyed with lack of visual content. Last time when I made a booking, I ended up with the same traveling agency I have booked earlier since their website is very well working on mobile and there is enough of information of the hotels, food, shopping, activities, area etc., but I would love to see more visual content of the surrounding areas. I do agree that it would be useful to have more personalized research while planning a trip.
I think it’s more common for Finns to make bookings online. According to the official statistics of Finland Finnish people bought 90% of international flights online and 98% of domestic flights on 2020 (Tilastokeskus 2021). According to the webinar more than half of travelers either plan or book their travels on mobile devices (PhocusWright 2017).
This webinar helped me to realize more about the struggle of online bookings. My generation has basically born with laptop in hands so it’s common to forget that using different devices is not so simple for all. It surprised me that digital age travelers still make a lot of bookings offline.
Sources:
PhocusWright, 2017. The perfect path: What travelers want – and don’t want in their digital journey. Accessed on 12 September 2022.
Tilastokeskus, 2021. Suomen virallinen tilasto SVT: Suomalaisten matkailu. Accessed on 12 September 2022. https://www.stat.fi/til/smat/2020/smat_2020_2021-03-30_kat_003_fi.html