London-based travel analysts EyeforTravel have reported the results of a survey of 450+ travel data professionals.
Highlights:
- 65% of travel organizations have a data/analytics team, but most are small �" the majority fewer than 5 people.
- Top 3 drivers of data/analytics programs:
- Enhance customer experience 17%
- Achieve competitive advantage 14%
- Improve conversion rates 14%
- Kinds of data most used to drive insight
- CRM
- Search
- 7% don’t gather any data on customers.
- 27% don’t have a clear understanding of what KPIs they should be measuring.
- 70% do diagnostic analytics, but only 36% are able to use their data to create prescriptive analytics.
- 47% are unable to deploy ads, prices, etc. in real time.
- Fewer than 10% are able to track users across all devices and touchpoints.
- 78% of marketers use social media in their campaigns.
- 62% name Facebook as best performing social network.
- Top 3 problem areas reported:
- Data quality and cleanliness
- Creating consistent data strategy
- Integrating external data
There are some obvious problems here:
- 7% of these analytics teams collect no data on customers??
- If 27% don't know what KPIs they should be tracking, that's a failure of the higher-ups in these organizations - the people with bottom-line responsibility. Usually this happens in largish, bureaucratic organizations where the people doing the work are far from the decisionmakers. And it makes them less competitive than entrepreneurial organizations.
- Almost half of teams surveyed are unable to make real-time changes - that's a big handicap in travel.
- Tracking obviously needs work.
- David
