Get to know your clients for personalising travel — without being off-putting
As we mentioned in our previous article, personalisation is the new luxury. Knowing and acting on your client’s individual preferences and passions creates the kind of low-key luxury which gains recommendations and repeat visits.

Storing this information in a CRM is important; using it is vital. Obtaining the information needed in order to act on it can be a tricky business though, especially for those businesses which rely on hands-off online bookings with minimal direct contact.
An email with a questionnaire is too heavy-handed and restrictive. Trying a direct phone communication post-booking can often just come off as a little too Blind Date.
Understandably, hotels and OTAs are at the forefront of trying to overcome this as they most directly stand to gain from obtaining personal preference information. However travel companies across the board could stand to learn from their methods in order to keep pace with client expectations and increase profits through add-ins.
So how do they achieve this and how far would they go?
- It is well-known though not advertised that a hotel in France collects information from guests’ Facebook pages in order to discover preferences, interests and personal life and uses these to tailor and personalise their stay. This may say as much about people’s lack of awareness over the importance of privacy settings on social media as it does about the hotel’s desire to “get to know you,” but it’s hard not to find this a little creepy if not outright stalker behaviour.
- With money behind them, Virgin Hotels have collected similar information using their ‘The Know’ questionnaire. This allows clients to select preferences such as minibar contents, arrival cocktails and provide allergy information. This integrates with their concierge app Lucy which allows clients to control their hotel environment, order room service and find recommendations for the local area.
- Other brands are trying a less formal approach in the form of chatbots. Booking.com has introduced an app allowing booked guests to use chatbots to ask questions about their chosen hotel and state their preferences. Currently this is limited to being a more interactive version of FAQs but there is potential to expand this to cover more in-depth personalisation at a later point. Pre-programming the chatbots within the app to dig for personalisation using keywords (as well as providing useful information during trips) would be a good way to dig for details. A simple “tell us about yourself” could provide some useful gems.
- Sticking with the OTAs, on a more grandiose scale, Kayak’s chatbots will comprehensively suggest flights, accommodation, tours and activities to bit locations or budgets. It also remembers previous bookings and will make suggestions if current searches relate to them. Kayak is looking to harness Machine Learning to increase the personalisation this service can offer and is definitely one to watch and learn from.
- Finally, moving away from mobile and chatbots, Expedia had huge success with their Travel Yourself Interesting campaign which allowed users to create infographics of how far they had travelled, how many destinations and modes of transport used amongst others. From this they captured data for over 15,500 people and allowed them to re-target their advertising. The potential for variations on this kind of social sharing mixed with data harvesting could be enormous, including collecting information on destinations, activities, whether they mostly travel with family, friends or solo, how adventurous they would be with their culinary choices or what their “perfect holiday” would be like — then providing services, information or perks tailored to match or achieve this.
Without a bank-busting budget, many of these options seem too out of reach for independent companies. However an increasing number of companies use chatbots which are often within a reasonable budget. Harnessing this to dig for details is straight forward enough, especially if combined with a confirmation mailshot suggesting a personalised service when quoting a keyword into the chatbot to start the conversation.
There are also plenty of low-cost, simple app building sites which can use messaging as a prime feature within them to allow this kind of indirect contact and which would allow smaller companies to trial these features before investing fully in anything purpose built. Beware the built-in adverts on free-versions of these services as they can put customers off completely.
Finally, for those looking for a more straight-forward option, using a questionnaire format, whether in the more open and obvious style of Virgin’s The Know or Expedia’s slightly less opaque social graphic production, is simple, cost-effective and achievable.
We hope this article has given you something to consider. If you feel we have missed a trick, please comment below. We always welcome your thoughts and feedback.
