In early June, we attended the Digital Travel Summit in London. This post is a recap of our key insights
Increasing automation
Yotel is a hotel chain with hotels in London, Amsterdam and New York. Fergus Boyd from Yotel said that 94% of their guests check in at the kiosk in the lobby instead of at the reception desk. Yotel also uses a robot for storing luggage for guests. You can see it in action in the video below
In a similar example, Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines have robotic bartenders
Achieving a consistent customer experience
Neil Roberts from Eurostar talked about the challenges of sharing information across a large organization. For example, the call center at Eurostar had traditionally been focused on sales and after sales activities. However, the Eurostar customer care team had to deal with situations when customers could not connect to WiFi onboard or when customers wanted to get in touch with the train manager who was at the front of the train.
Nick White from Thomas Cook Airlines talked about how the airline has setup a “Customer experience board” with leaders from different parts of the airline. The board includes leaders from the contact center, onboard entertainment, etc. This group meets regularly to review different touch points of the customer journey and launch new initiatives. They use a framework called “Little lifts” where they map out the full customer journey and identify “drags” (where customers might have a bad experience). They introduce “lifts” that can improve the experience during the drags. An example of this could be enabling customers to watch the in-flight entertainment while they are waiting in the boarding gate during an unscheduled aircraft delay.
What were your takeaways from the conference? Let us know in the comments!
