Executive Summary

Messaging technology is expanding at a rapid pace across the online commerce ecosystem, across categories. Especially among younger users, ages 18–29, it is a rapidly evolving and nearly primary method of electronic communications.

For the travel industry, in which messaging tech has experienced a slow growth rooted in GDS and finding some initial traction in business-travel arrangements, the impetus to develop and implement new messaging approaches is now a point of focus. It is a drive directed in two key directions: (a) bookings and the ways messaging can fuel conversions; (b) marketing/operations as messaging can foster positive customer experiences and loyalty-building interactions. This white paper addresses the marketing operations side of the messaging technology equation. A companion Skift report will focus on bookings and messaging tech.

In the marketplace at present, while Facebook stands to steer much of the conversation around messaging technology with its Messenger and WhatsApp properties, companies such as Twitter and even Kayak are moving to compete by changing functionality within their platforms. Meanwhile, startups such as Slack are pursuing — and reaching — user bases in aggressive and significant quantities (in Slack’s case, they’re doubling every three months by some estimates.)

The implications around data and analytics are also significant as messaging technology expands within the travel industry. Legacy companies like Sabre see the opportunities to acquire new insights into traveler behaviors, open vistas on up-sell strategies for the future.

Vertical by vertical, messaging technology is moving at different paces within the travel industry. Southwest Airlines is implementing messaging strategies with interest, but carefully. Plans for future rollouts include geolocation as a messaging-tech approach. Meanwhile, rental car innovators such as Silvercar have built messaging into the back-end of their user experiences. It is a model experts suggest is acutely needed at hotels.

Within hospitality, Hyatt is seeing early and significant traction with user response to WeChat in Chinese markets. Additionally, companies like Checkmate are fueling not only a centralized way for marketing and operations to visualize and act on guest-to-hotel messaging across platforms, but to share data between the two departments. That stands to fuel a convergence of marketing and operations in how offers, services, and loyalty-creating experiences reach travelers in the first place.

Lateral to the concerns of marketing and operations on-site is the rise of messaging communities around particular travel styles and demographics. Nomad List and Travel Noire are two examples, and they represent a frontier of focused data — if travel companies can penetrate early resistance to marketing within the spaces.

Introduction

Messaging technology across the online ecosystem is growing at a significant pace. Based on data we can examine from the past half decade, this growth promises to dominate ongoing mobile-user behavior.

Growth of Messaging Across Sectors

As the following chart illustrates, messaging is a consumer interest that online commerce companies in all categories would do well to address.

Source: Skift Magazine: Megatrends Defining Travel in 2016: http://skift.com/2016/01/13/skift-annual-forecast-megatrends-defining-travel-in-2016/

Glossary of Messaging

Short Message Service (SMS): The standard text message that users send from traditional mobile phones and smartphones. SMS connects senders to recipients via phone numbers and cellular networks, and is rooted to the user’s text plan with the phone’s provider. SMS texts are typically limited to 160–240-characters.

Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS): An evolution of SMS functionality, MMS can include pictures, video, and audio.

Mobile Instant Messaging: A typical example is Apple’s Messages app (also referred to as iMessages). Natively included in a given device, MIM can connect users via phone numbers and cellular service, but when multiple users with the same kinds of device and service are engaged — in the case of Messages, for example — the app connects them via the Internet and is based on the users’ data plans and not their text plans.

Messaging Apps/Platforms: The third-party messaging app, or platform, offers an alternative to first-party apps such as Messages. Users download third-party apps to their devices, or in some cases use them via the Web. Examples include WhatsApp, Viber, the spun-off version of Facebook Messenger, and WeChat. Some messaging apps, such as Snapchat, delete users’ messages almost instantly, differing from other platforms in that they preserve no thread of conversation for later reference.

Furthermore, as Misco reports, recent Pew Research Center data also show that messaging-tech adoption is expanding aggressively among younger smartphone users.

In the report, 49% of survey respondents age 18–29 use messaging platforms and 41% use auto-delete messaging platforms such as Snapchat and Wickr. ¹

By comparison 36% of all respondents use messaging; 17% use auto-delete messaging.

The rapid acceleration of messaging speaks to an evident change in how consumers — especially Millennials and Generation Z — are using the Internet and the mobile Web, and how consumers will use it going forward. It is a transformation that threatens to leave behind slow-to-adapt companies — the quickest adapters will seize upon advances in audience growth, revenue expansion, and customer recognition. The implications extend to established companies and platforms as well. As Activate, the media consultancy, puts it, in a recent report what users do in native apps today, they will also do in messaging apps tomorrow. ²

“There’s a market there that’s sort of ripe to be taken,” says Brian Harniman, co-founder and partner at Brand New Matter, in a Skift interview. Brand New Matter advises, invests in, and incubates new ventures. Among its portfolio is Assist, a bot-driven messaging-based transaction app.

“If you’re going to go mobile-first right now, messaging is an easier way to build a clean UX then trying to build the next Google interface for travel,” Harniman says. “I think you’ll see a lot of folks … thinking about this and growing, or at least building quickly.”

Messaging Technology and The Travel Industry

The travel industry hasn’t neglected messaging altogether. However, many industry leaders have yet to fully address its potential in a consumer-facing way.

The history of messaging technology within the travel industry has followed a behind-the-scenes trajectory for decades.

In a key example, as an idea first iterated in the 1960s and then tracking alongside the phenomenal expansion of computing power across the remainder of the previous century, the rise of travel’s global distribution system (GDS) represented messaging’s emergence in a particular way. That is, GDS gave travel agents a technology that focused on real-time reservation-making communications, one that employed proprietary terminology as users sent messages to a network — the network being third parties such as Sabre and Galileo, and later including travel suppliers directly.

In this GDS environment, with what is effectively a system-specific shorthand, agents (then and now) engage with structured electronic messaging, often highly automated in process, making requests for inventory from vendors who then deliver that inventory — i.e. tickets, room reservations and the like — for the agent’s client travelers.

As early as the 1990s, however, individual travelers — business travelers in particular — began to explore direct electronic messaging around travel requests. A corporate traveler, for example, sent real-time requests to their assistants and corporate-travel coordinators via e-mail and short message service (SMS) texts. The business traveler gave the details — e.g. airports of departure and arrival, travel dates, and carrier preferences — and the requests were presumably filled.

But for a long time this direct ask-and-receive relationship was not so much the focus of the more general kind of traveler’s experience. Specifically, starting in the mid to late 1990s, online travel agencies became the primary hub for leisure and non-business consumers, allowing these travelers to research and book via the Internet and, later, mobile apps.

Recently, however, the industry has evidenced a shift toward a new look at the one-to-one supplier–consumer experience.

Startup companies and legacy travel brands are giving fresh attention to messaging technology in travel. With behavioral trends like those the first chart in this introduction illustrates, the impetus around capturing opportunities within the messaging space has evolved. Messaging is being newly considered as not only a primary way to reach and interact with travelers — fostering positive customer experiences in-trip, cementing loyalty, and encouraging long-term repeat bookings — but it is also becoming a highly useful toolkit on the operations side, prompting fresh looks at how to build efficient, viewable, reactive and proactive kinds of data-driven strategies for customer service and relations.

In this white paper, we turn our specific attention to the role of messaging as it becomes impactful to the customer relations, marketing, and operations space. In the sections that follow, we consider key messaging players to which travel is turning, and how airlines, hospitality, transportation, and other verticals are using those platforms to enhance travel experiences. This paper also opens vistas onto how back-of-house messaging is changing some suppliers’ approaches to operations, and onto how travelers and travel publishers are adapting messaging technology to their own pre- and in-journey experiences.

In a forthcoming companion white paper, Skift will give close attention to the ways travel companies are striving for bookings within the messaging space, a moderately more nascent-stage effort and one that deserves its own point of focus.

State Of Messaging: Key Players, Trends, and Intersections With Travel

Driven especially by the rise of the mobile device as an everyday and essential component of consumers’ journeys, messaging technology stands to foreground the power of direct communications between travelers, travel marketing, and operations. Messaging positions travel suppliers to address queries on a real-time basis and nearly instantaneously, and it gives travel operations the opportunity to coordinate on-site efforts in new and powerful ways.

Dominant Players In The Messaging Marketplace

While the push is on to capture messaging audiences, there are two significant global players among the platforms currently succeeding at that drive, and Facebook owns both of them.
Between the company’s WhatsApp platform and Messenger, the social network is poised to command a wide segment of market as messaging emerges within the travel space.

Source: Skift Magazine: Megatrends Defining Travel in 2016: http://skift.com/2016/01/13/skift-annual-forecast-megatrends-defining-travel-in-2016/

Travel companies are especially incorporating the rapidly growing options of third-party messaging platforms such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and others. The number of texts sent daily on WhatsApp, for instance, come to about 30 billion — already exceeding the estimated daily tally of 20 billion SMS, MMS, and MIM text messages. ³ The following chart shows the growth in messaging as compared to other online social and communications options.

Source: Skift Magazine: Megatrends Defining Travel in 2016: http://skift.com/2016/01/13/skift-annual-forecast-megatrends-defining-travel-in-2016/

Note that messaging apps are outpacing timeline- and feed-based models — in this case, perennially popular platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest.

Messaging Technology As a Global Shift

The travel-messaging ecosystem is also trending toward geography-specific equations.

That is, platforms such as WeChat are doing particularly well in Chinese markets, where brands such as Hyatt and airline consortiums including Star Alliance are reaching out via the service to reach travelers. ⁷

Third party developers are also flocking to WeChat, in China. One developer, Mobvoi, unveiled Chumen Wenwen, a service that allows travelers to query recommendations for bars, restaurants, weather and transportation and then receive answers via messages from WeChat. ⁸

Some social network platforms are making moves in response. Twitter announced last year that it was lifting the character-cap on its direct messaging feature, for example, from 140 to 10,000. It was a significant enough shift that Wired declared the platform “just became a messaging app”. ⁴ The move helps reposition Twitter to better compete with Facebook Messenger, iMessage, WhatsApp, and the like.

Meanwhile, startups such as Slack are pursuing — and reaching — specific user sets in significant ways. Designed for large-group use, the app was initially pitched to business teams. Teams formed around travelers from, say, the African diaspora and travelers that stay on the road as a kind of nomadic lifestyle, however, are also finding a place for their conversations within Slack’s subscription ecosystem. And, as Slack’s user base doubles every three months (according to recent analysis) competing services are already emerging, one example being HipChat. ⁵

And while new and hungry startups are likely to flood the travel-messaging space in the short term, older travel brands such as Kayak are also adding modules such as Kayak Snap, a forthcoming SMS-based travel service. ⁶

Audience Factors: Messaging As a Data Opportunity

For travel, an important element of the messaging-tech evolution is that the technology predicates group conversations already focused on a core topic. When that topic is travel, it can help define the audience into which travel marketing wants to tap — an audience that is engaged and one generating lots of highly relevant marketing data.

For example, GDS-legacy brand Sabre saw an estimated 1 billion texts across its messaging service TripCase, in 2015. The goal of the messaging service is now largely and expressly to move the conversation around Sabre’s services to something wider than bookings alone.

“The TripCase platform will allow us to develop robust report capabilities providing agents and suppliers valuable insight into their customers’ behavior and integrate important functionalities such as check-in, loyalty program features,” according to a company news release. ⁹

Likewise, mTrip, a builder of mobile solutions for the travel industry, recently deployed in-app text messaging for its clients. mTrip promotes the new feature as “the best way to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty … allowing customers to easily ask questions or send comments about their trip” and allowing agencies and travel brands to “engage with them, offering upsells through rich messages including pictures and booking buttons.”
And while scale may well be a challenge for newer messaging platforms in the short-term, travel suppliers are somewhat insulated from the implications of that consideration. That is, travel companies have identified a deep audience for their product already, and, with what they understand about their consumer base in mind, they can pick and choose whether to create in-house messaging technology or pick from the third-party options that surround them.

Now, as the travel executives and leaders in the next sections suggest, a key trick will be to shift internal business cultures and approaches to seize the messaging-tech opportunity that is before them.

Messaging and Travelers, Marketing and Ops

Lines between how messaging technology can be used within the travel industry — on the one hand for bookings, on the other hand to craft customer experiences and relationships, which is the purview of marketing and operations — emerge according to the scenarios endemic to how customers interact with travel suppliers in different verticals. In the following subsections, this paper gives attention to key examples across airlines, rental cars, and hospitality.

Airlines and The Messaging-Tech Evolution

Airlines may well find themselves flush with messaging–bookings opportunities, as experts such as Brian Harniman, at Brand New Matter, see the landscape. The reason is related to the product in question, and process of earning conversions.

“Airlines typically involve a simple information flow,” Harniman says. “Airport to airport, how many stops? How long is it and how much does it cost? Not in that order, but those factors are almost always constants in terms of what the customer wants.”

The subject of bookings is the focus of a forthcoming companion white paper to this report. However, Skift spoke with Southwest Airlines about how messaging technology can be impactful to air-travel in terms of customer experience, operations, and marketing.

“Like a lot of the other airlines, we’re definitely in an exploratory point right now with regard to how we interact with our customers,” via messaging, says Erin Sanderson, manager of Mobile Channels at Southwest.

As part of that exploration, the airline is taking what could be described as measured steps. Southwest has held back from on-boarding third-party apps, preferring to communicate via push notifications in their native app, along with a limited text-messaging approach, and giving fresh attention to the messaging-like uses of e-mail. Passengers can purchase iMessage access on Southwest’s planes, and they can also e-mail Southwest directly with questions or feedback while in flight via onboard Wi-Fi.

“We do interact with our customers through a number of different push notifications,” she continues, “and you can get your tickets and stuff like that, and some flight notifications. There is that limited use of SMS, but we don’t do a lot of that.”

“We do not use select services such as WhatsApp or direct back-and-forth messaging techniques,” Sanderson says. “We try to be less obtrusive to the customer. Something that we’re putting in place in the near future is a way for customers to actually directly e-mail to us with business, to give us feedback on their experience with Southwest through the mobile app. That won’t be real-time, that will be e-mail.”

The impetus for e-mail, according to Sanderson, is to provide a one-to-one channel separate from what has now become a common traveler–airline communications conduit: the social web, and in particular Twitter.

“We want to get them the ability that if they’re having a neutral or negative experience to be able to reach out to us directly with specific feedback that isn’t necessarily something that they have to call us for or that they whole world has to see via Twitter,” she says. “Or if they are trying to give us helpful feedback. Which does happen a lot of times.”

It is also a wise move from the standpoint of marketing seeking to contain complaints, one might note. In any case, the trend toward e-mail interactions extends to the aircraft cabin as well.

“We get customer correspondence through our wireless portal on the plane itself,” says Adam Rucker, media relations at Southwest. And when tweets and Facebook posts do require in-the-moment responses, Southwest moves the discussion to direct messaging on the Twitter platform. This is perhaps where messaging technology has truly taken root at the airline, at in the airline vertical overall.

The future for Southwest, says Sanderson, will incorporate messaging tech even more aggressively.

“There are so many new technologies and ways of communicating with our customers that, from an enterprise point of view, as well as from a customer-facing point of view, we’re sort of playing around with a lot of technologies,” she says. “We’re looking at taking geo-locations further, further than just personalized content, but rather what are the ways in which we communicate with the customer that are specifically based on where they are in the airport? Different factors, but things like that.”

Ground Transportation: A Case For Messaging Experiences

According to Brian Harniman, as a key player at Brand New Matter in the growth of Assist — a startup using messaging technology to connect consumers and travelers with local services such as restaurant reservations, delivery of goods, and the like — ground transportation may well represent a strong suit for messaging in the travel space. Silvercar is a key example, as Harniman notes, of a company using messaging to keep travelers connected to real-time rental-car info as they land and move into the next leg of a trip.

“The minute you … land at San Francisco, or Austin, they message you,” says Harniman of the Silvercar app. “They text you and tell you what’s happening. That’s pretty strong stuff.”

It also suggests a behind-the-scenes technological profile oriented to craft customer experiences in ways that are most relevant to travelers on a given trip. The call, in that regard, is out for travel as an industry to pick up the pace in building robust, proactive messaging technology into every journey.

For example, says Harniman, “it’s not the front-end that’s the problem in the hospitality industry. It’s the back-end system where you’re literally talking about a guest in Room 2202 wanting fresh linens … and that’s not done by computer, or by messaging technology. That’s done by somebody calling somebody else [in operations] on a walkie-talkie, and that’s really, really where technology is lacking … on the back-end.”

It is the kind of challenge — moving from old models to new ones — that could, in the eyes of executives leading startups around the hospitality space, transform marketing and operations into a messaging-empowered machine that creates loyal travelers and guests. The following subsection traces that possibility as it is unfolding right now.

Hospitality: Creating The Next Generation Of Operations With Messaging Technology

To take a measure of where and how messaging technology has penetrated aspects of the hospitality vertical, Hyatt’s recent move to engage Chinese markets via WeChat messaging is a helpful start.

“In 2015, we received and responded to more than 50,000 WeChat messages,” says Dan Moriarty, director of social strategy and activation at Hyatt, in a Skift interview. Some 60% of those interactions, he says, revolved around on-site experiences. The other 40% focused on bookings.

“Many guests find WeChat easy to use and a natural gateway to activities information or transactions,” Moriarty says. “We see high engagement with guests around account management, offers, and enrollment in our loyalty program. Some of the functions guests can enjoy on the Hyatt WeChat app also include on-site guest services.”

Important to any consideration of Hyatt, WeChat, and messaging technology in the travel industry, is also the notion that brand–consumer conversations are significantly traveler driven.

“Unlike platforms like Twitter, where conversations are often public and we can jump in when it makes sense, these conversations have to be initiated by guests,” says Moriarty. “So we’re reliant on guests knowing we’re on these platforms. Opportunities we are exploring are integration or initiation points from our other owned digital platforms, such as e-mail confirmations, the Hyatt website, or the Hyatt mobile app. Although there is a lot of growth already on messaging apps, we know there are more guests who we can better care for with increased awareness.”

Considerations of awareness are not confined to hoteliers hoping that travelers can find hotel messaging options. Suppliers are also positioned, via messaging tech, to increase their awareness of guest details and then, ideally, incorporate what they aggregate about their customers into the messaging exchange itself. For hotel groups such as Commune Hotels + Resorts, operating in the U.S., Canada, and Europe, that means bringing in third-party partners to assist.

“Just look at how SMS eclipsed voice communication,” says Niki Leondakis, chief executive officer at Commune, in a recent Skift article. ¹⁰ “And start-ups such as Uber are setting a precedent for on-demand communication. Where consumers spend their time has changed; it’s now SMS, messaging apps, and e-mail. By extending our service into these channels, we’re bringing a boutique hospitality experience to today’s consumer in a way they prefer to communicate.”

The strategy underway at Commune — the company announced a merger with Destination Hotels in January 2016 — is fueled in large part by Checkmate, a business that works to supply travel verticals such as hospitality with a more messaging-based customer-experience approach.

“One of the challenges that travelers have time and again is they think they’re talking to a single entity when they talk to hotels,” says Drew Patterson, Checkmate’s CEO, in a Skift interview. “In fact, that hotel is composed of a number of shift-based teams and individuals. You have somebody who might be dealing with the front desk, or another operator that took that call. You have a kitchen that actually has to prep that room-service order. You have a runner that has to take that thing upstairs.

“As you move between those departments, information gets lost,” says Patterson. “Particularly in the kind of analog world we’re in today … there’s a chain of telephone that takes place.

“The consequence is when anything breaks down or a customer’s expectations are exceeded, it can be a very frustrating conversation,” he says. “One of the consequences of messaging as a means of service delivery, however, is it has this kind of record. If it’s visible to everyone else in the organization, then the business can start to act with a collective intelligence.”

In Checkmate’s case, the collective intelligence empowers the back-of-house, especially when it provides them a central dashboard that operations can access when and where needed. Checkmate’s dashboard is also platform neutral, meaning hoteliers can draw on a wide range of messaging options, from Facebook Messenger to Apple’s Messages, whatever channel a guest chooses to use.

And it stands to be a two-way conversation, based on guest data, as outreach opportunities emerge.

“Particularly interesting are situations like special events.” Patterson says. “I might like it if ops can reach everyone who’s staying and attending a wedding or a meeting” with context-specific and relevant information about on-property services and features.

From a spa to a hair salon, to a happy hour that coincides with a business event’s conclusion, messaging to previously identified members of a guest subset represents not only strong operations strategy, but it is also illustrative of an ops–marketing convergence — or at least a potential convergence — around messaging technology.

“That’s the question,” says Patterson. “In some respects, who is the buyer of messaging software? Is it the VP of marketing or is it the director of operations? Is it an operational function that should look more like voice or is this a marketing function that should look more like e-mail?

“Our intention is, it’s the former,” he says. “This looks more like how you run the business. This is more of an operational tool that it is also a marketing tool, but I think that’s an open question.”

Perspectives: Travel Publishers and Travelers Building Communities Around Messaging Tech

Travelers are plugging into the community-building potential of messaging applications. In some cases, publishers in the travel-writing industry are providing the resources. Scenarios are developing in which consumers are joining messaging-based travel communities for trip-planning and in-trip resources.

Slack, for example, via its app-based ecosystem of groups — or teams — gives users the opportunity to create messaging communities around topics. One travel participant in the Slack space is #nomads — a companion chat platform for the Nomad List, a guide for expats, retirees, and independent workers with wanderlust — which features more than 3,000 users falling into a demographic of global workers with a penchant for global wandering. According to one recent report, the #nomads community boasts the following statistics.

Slack has also become a platform where publisher Travel Noire’s audience is discovering meaningful ways of answering questions about the journeys they take.

Travel Noire is a digital publishing platform that creates tools and resources for the unconventional trip-taker. Launched in 2013, Travel Noire points its content primarily at travelers within demographics desiring, as the company’s tagline puts it, cultivated insights from a community of black travelers. ¹¹ Within its audience — primarily 25–35 years old, skewing female, based in metropolitan areas, and earning an annual average of $75,000 — the premium, subscription-based #TNdistrict Slack “team” is exchanging travel insights.

Slack is the first messaging app Travel Noire has used in connection with its audience, and Travel Noire began the moderated Slack-team project in late 2014. (The company declined to disclose how many members are signed onto the team.)

“People have the opportunity to create different threads of discussion,” says Moraa Onyonka, head of business development at Travel Noire, in a Skift interview. “In the beginning, when we were starting up the community, we had a few general topics, like ‘finance,’ like ‘road trips’ — really general ones — and then, after that, people started to create their own, and maintain the discussions.

“One of the topics that we saw grow was remote work, and living that nomadic life,” she says. “That one has really thrived. People are constantly sharing information with each other on how to make the shift … whether that means finding information on how to live abroad, how to find study abroad programs … sharing those details. Topics like ‘where to stay’ are also really, really important, whether it’s sharing information about Airbnb, or hotels, different types of accommodations are really a key subject, too.”

Also significant, according to Onyonka, is the emergence of users messaging with each other to make plans and embark on trips together, even if they’ve never met before.

What hasn’t happened yet, Onyonka says, is that Travel Noire has not opened the gates around #TNdistrict to travel brands. The company is deeply committed to keeping its burgeoning Slack team free of advertisements or other external influences — an effort Onyonka describes as focused on preserving authenticity.

If a way to create a partnership that protects that element of #TNdistrict — and what she describes of Travel Noire’s adherence to authenticity in general — should emerge, however, then she suspects the publisher will take a serious look at the opportunity.

“It will be really interesting to do it if we can do it in an authentic way,” Onyonka says.

More than interesting, it will be an invaluable new point of access for travel brands seeking to reach Travel Noire’s Slack team members.

Across the industry as well, the rise of non-supplier driven messaging communities could represent a next step for marketing and operations executives — a way to tap deep insights about the wants and needs of the consumers they seek to convert and serve. As it moves forward, for travel, the state of marketing and operations, as each intersects with emergent and evolving messaging technology, is one of listening, learning, and testing new functionality. It is also, primarily, one in which would do well to not interrupt the conversations travelers are trying to have.

As with so much of the digital-marketing space that travel shares, however, the key will be to preserve the positive aspects of real-time communications without compromising the chance to learn and create new strategies from what travelers have to say, one message at a time.

Insights and Strategies

• Messaging is primarily a traveler-driven interface. Travel operations work in a primarily reactive space when it comes to messaging technology. Similarly, marketing departments must ensure that any use of messaging tech is based around quantifiable traveler actions. Checkmate’s example of understanding vectors for messaging in hospitality is on-point, in this regard: when operations can identify guest subsets, marketing can reach out those individuals with messages catered to experiences already underway (a wedding, a conference, etc.). To do other wise, as Southwest Airlines points out in this paper, is to risk intruding upon consumers’ trip-planning and in-trip experiences.
• The more complex the supplier’s ecosystem, the greater value of visualization. As with almost any data-driven effort in travel marketing and operations, key to successfully acknowledging the traveler experience and contextualizing messages and communications is a central, sharable way for hotels, airlines, and other suppliers to aggregate and visualize information. Messaging technology is creating value in this effort in that it is often text based to begin with and can help operations, for example, respond to messaged requests with more accuracy and personalization than a chain of phone calls or voice communications between disparate departments and staff.
• Messaging technology can be a data-rich resource for thirsty travel analytics. Conversations between travel supplier and their customers create analyzable data around consumer sentiment, intent, wants, and needs. “What we’re really focused on with all of this input … the conversation that’s coming in and going out,” says Erin Sanderson, at Southwest Airlines, includes “using the … big-data approach, which we very much use on the ground to prioritize how we want to change our platforms, to prioritize features that we want to add or remove or change. That’s all coming from the big-data view of our customer,” that messaging technology is helping to drive.
• Slow-to-adopt travel cultures will open the playing field for aggressive messaging-tech travel-experience innovators. The still prominent role of social-web messaging, e-mail, and voice among travel verticals represents a key angle in how Drew Patterson, co-founder and chief executive officer at Checkmate, looks the messaging technology curve in travel. “In the commercial world, we’re still in the really early game,” Patterson says of messaging tech. “The e-mail and the phone are still dominant ways that commercial interaction — consumer and business interaction — takes place today. I think you can think of Twitter as a half step.” The full step, however, is the one-to-one real-time marketing and operations conversation — traveler to brand; supplier to consumer. For travel companies that take the full step forward in the early-game ecosystem Patterson describes, customers will find experiences that cater to their needs, foster their loyalty, and streamline the processes that do both. The end result is a revenue/costs advantage, one that can be coupled with Skift’s look at messaging technology and bookings in the companion white paper to this report.

Endnotes and Further Reading