Why travel brands seek edge with Natural Language Processing
Holiday descriptions are a great way to maximize conversions because what a customer reads about the destination influences whether or not she’ll buy. A compelling description
BA.com strikes a great balance between listing the practical details and describing the great things about the holiday (highlights mine) –
Sani Beach is situated in the beautiful resort of Sani, overlooking miles of white sands and with luxury facilities including an enticing spa.
Spend relaxing breaks stretched out on the beach, lounging around the heated outdoor swimming pools or being pampered at the spa. With a creche and kids’ club provided, parents can unwind while children are kept safe and entertained. For the active, a fitness studio, coach-assisted tennis and a variety of water sports are available. The spectacular Mediterranean scenery also beckons to keen mountain bikers.
Guest rooms are spacious, contemporary and well-appointed, enjoying wonderful views of the azure Aegean Sea or beautifully landscaped gardens.
Every taste and appetite is catered for at the wide choice of buffet or à la carte restaurants and bars.
The holiday description also contains valuable marketing signals. Marketing professionals already use segmentation and business rules to help improve newsletter personalization, but marketers have also become increasingly interested in the ability for artificial intelligence to revolutionize their profession, and one of the hottest areas is called “Natural Language Processing,” which entails teaching computers to understand the nuances of human language.
In the jargon, text is known as ‘unstructured’ data because it doesn’t come in numerical values and therefore is difficult to convert into tabular data that can be stored in a marketing database. Yet growing computing power and advances in programming have enabled data scientists to transform product description text into a goldmine for marketers.
In the field of Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, often shortened to NLP, is gaining wide-scale attention from marketers. As an example of best practice, Spotify uses NLP to systematically scan a listener’s listening history — scoring each song with a variety of attributes and using that data to store/update a user’s musical tastes. Spotify then uses this semantic profile to ‘surprise and delight’ listeners with a stream of fresh and relevant music that is ranked according to that listener’s unique and evolving musical tastes. Applying this technology to email merchandising is the next step in NLP’s evolution.
Travel brands can use NLP by doing what Spotify, Netflix, Google, and Amazon are already doing very successfully: proactively recognise each customer, understand their unique tastes and preferences, then recommend the best destinations and products such as packages, hotels, vacation rentals, cruises, tours, and more. Each recommendation dynamically ranks and merchandises the most relevant product and destination for every user.
Consumer engagement data is being produced and captured at an exponentially increasing rate, and NLP is a critical strategy to help serve customers better. Travel brands are using NLP to infer a customer’s tastes and make recommendations based on those tastes, because travel brands that cannot understand each customer’s unique tastes and preferences risk falling behind.
Consumers expect a more individualized retail experience.
Travel marketing is going through a period of intense change, and NLP is one of the most potent tools a travel brands can use to stay ahead of the OTAs and other global aggregators.
NLP enables you to add a human touch to boost your site’s shopping experience, help smash the glass ceiling of rules-based personalization and provides the ability to talk with travellers as if there was an attentive and helpful travel guide on the other side of the screen.
Photo credit: ba.com
