Tracking the online behavior of travelers across a range of devices remains a significant challenge for the travel and tourism industry, according to a recent survey of industry marketing professionals. The EyeforTravel’s State of Data and Analytics in Travel Report 2017 found that about half of the professionals surveyed have limited visibility of customers as they hop across devices and sites during their journey. Of those surveyed, 54.3 percent reported that they could track users to a limited or no degree at all – 24.5 percent could track users to a limited degree, 16 percent could track users only their own domains, and 13.8 percent couldn’t track users at all.
The report illustrates that cross-device behaviors remain a prevalent challenge in the industry. For those professionals that reported that the ability to track users in some detail, just one in four could track them across devices and touchpoints.
“I think attribution will be one of the big focuses for travel brands over the medium-term,” said Alex Hadwick, Head of Research at EyeforTravel. “Our consumer-focused research shows that travelers are increasing their usage of mobile, especially in Asia-Pacific markets, but huge numbers of consumers switch devices during their journey with desktop still the main channel globally in terms of spending. With personalization the primary stated goal of the industry, brands will need to be able to track users more effectively as they switch across sites but particularly across devices if they want to truly understand the journey.”
The survey also found that out of the more than 450 travel data professionals surveyed, just 30.9 percent are gathering geo-spatial and geographic data and 30.6 percent are looking at mobile app data to get insight into customers. However, the industry is expected to invest in systems and skills to expand efforts into multi-channel data gathering – the report notes that three quarters believe that their department will receive budget increases in 2017, versus 4 percent who expect a decrease.
