Product ecosystem for holiday marketplace, TravelTriangle.com !!
TravelTriangle(TT) is an online holiday marketplace that connects travelers to multiple local travel agents to help them create a memorable holiday.
Holidays are a complicated entity involving many moving parts. It involves finalization of destination, cities, flights, hotels, activities, sightseeing, cabs, dates, budget, company, agents. All this finalization happens in different sequence for different people. For some budget finalization comes first, for others activity finalization. At each step there are multiple factors involved in finalization. An additional level of complexity is added by multiple actors like travelers, agents, travel advisors and multiple product and telephonic interactions.
Due to manifold complexity of the problem, for the last couple of decades, holiday sales has been happening over call, emails as it has been a very subjective sales process for the travel agents.
At traveltriangle, we are constantly striving to create the best holiday planning and booking experience for the travelers.
What we understood after a rigorous customer research process was that the travel needs for every traveler is very different and the vacation means different things to different people.
In order to achieve best planning and booking experience for our travelers, we need to understand the needs of the traveler. Our product, design, analytics and tech teams are constantly striving towards achieving this goal by working on an ecosystem of products that make the life of a traveler very easy.
Productscape + Some of the challenges we are solving at TT
1. Project uTTopia
Understanding the traveler profile and his/her needs along with the additional destination context becomes fundamental to everything we do at traveltriangle.It fundamentally shapes the user journey by defining the next Action Item, which can be a mix of online or offline touch points.
Eg. A user not sure of the destination, is assigned a nurturing team as next action item. Similarly, user sure of the destination and price sensitive is sent a quote on the email with the discount options.
How do we understand the psychology of the user to cluster them in one or the other segment by detailed data understanding using advanced ML algorithms and on basis of this explicit or derived intent, trying multiple initiatives on what will work to make the life of the traveler easier?
2. Experimentation platforms
Once you understand the implicit and explicit needs of the traveler, experimentations platforms are set in-place to see whatever content you are experimenting is working for the traveler or not. It forms the litmus test for all your hypothesis. There are tons of experiments running on these platforms every day.
Important question is how can we roll out enough experiments, using data analysis, customer understanding and intuition, to create something for the traveler, agent, admin, which significantly move the customer experience, conversions, agent efficiency, admin efficiency?
3. Marketing, SEO Products and Blog
Significant traffic and travelers come to our platform through organic channels. At traveltriangle we constantly strive getting more and more audience organically and to reduce Marketing as a %age of GMV to create a sustainable business. In order to achieve this we keep optimizing our
- SEO products
- Blogs
- Return on Marketing Campaigns by rigorous data analysis and feedbacks.
Along with all this we keep experimenting to improve Visitor to Lead created ratio of all these platforms.
How can we optimize these platforms to nurture travelers and also increase travelers manifold?
3. Transaction platform (Web, Mobile-web and Apps)
How do you create a seamless holiday booking flow for the travelers ? How do you hook the travelers so TT becomes their goto app for any future holiday need?
4. Agent Dashboard and App
Travel agents have been using registers, emails, ledger books to do sales, booking and post sales operations. There hasn’t been any major innovation that has changed the way they operate for the last 2–3 decades, thus leaving scope for technology to enter in the space.
We are creating powerful dashboards and apps for the travel agents to make them super efficient in sales and holiday creation which in-turn will better the traveler experience.
How to make the product super easy for them to use and to make agents super efficient? What would be the right levers to keep them engaged and motivated in the system? How do you become the nervous system of supply industry ?
5. Supply Network
To enable our customers find better packages and to have greater control on the supply we have our own supply network, which includes Hotels, Activities, Sightseeing, cab, Flights etc. Travel agents can buy all this supply from us.
How do you maintain quality and availability of a supply which is completely fragmented and majorly offline ?
6. Admin Dashboards
Our Travel Advisors keep helping and nurturing the customers to create perfect holidays.
How do you enable them to understand the traveler stage/profile and using advanced learning methods suggest them what pointers should they talk to travelers about to take them to the next stage of the finalization cycle ?
7. During holiday App
Traveltriangle has an app which also serves as a travel companion to the travelers during the holiday period.
How can we use this app to help traveler create beautiful memories at the destination and to be one stop solution for all the holiday hassles ?
8. Dopamine Regulatory Systems (DRS)
How can we create systems and gamification modules that will enable the actors to work in a specific desired way in the marketplace and; also to reward the good and weed out the bad actors in the system ?
9. Data Layer
How can we use traveler browsing, booking, profile, call, email etc data to suggest the next best action item to the traveler and also, what all meaningful insights can you derive from past data?
10. Data Network Effects
We have data of more than million travelers, which helps us better the existing platform and get more data from travelers.
Using this data, What all can we suggest travelers(hotels, activities, price points etc) on the platform to create a significantly better traveler planning and booking experience ?
Lot of interesting things happening in each of these products. Join us in solving these challenging problems.
Next Action Items:
- If you are from design, product, analytics or tech background, and are really interested in solving any of the above mentioned challenges and creating a world class holiday product for the travelers; email at Kaul@traveltriangle.com
- If you know anyone in your network who might be interested in solving these problems, do share this article.
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