These examples show how data is being increasingly used for travel purposes, but there’s still a long way to go.
Data is a valuable commodity in any industry just now, but how is it being used in travel to provide better services? By looking at how data is being gathered and used in various ways, we can see how it has become a vital component of any new travel project and is going to be even more vital in the future.
How to personalize and package services
Travel businesses collect vast quantities of data that let them see how people travel and what their preferences are. These details are then analyzed to help better understand customer behavior and trends. The end result is that that can more accurately calculate demand levels and also offer personalized services.
The Travel Insights with Google tool that was launched a couple of years helps marketing teams to decide what to offer by giving them real-time insights into travel search data. However, this is often just the starting point as companies then need to use their own data to complete the picture and understand what they need to do to meet the current demand.
The idea of using data to customize and personalize can be seen in other industries, which allows to us see how this could work in travel in the future. For example, the Sportingtech website shows how the latest data is passed to sportsbooks and online casinos to allow them to provide a variety of customized betting options to their visitors. With close to a million pre-match and live betting events each year mentioned, it’s a market whose size can be compared to the travel business in some ways.
Analyzing active travel data
Active travel is the type of travel that’s done on a local basis and usually involves some sort of physical exercise. It includes walking and cycling, which are activities that have traditionally been extremely difficult to track and collect useful data on. It’s more commonly done by individual users who want to collect the data of their trips for health monitoring purposes or solely for entertainment.
That may change now, as the UK’s active travel charity named Sustans has launched a tool that they believe will help us to better understand the local data gathered on attitudes and behaviors. Called the Sustrans Walking and Cycling Ibex Data Tool, it was created with the help of the B Team design agency and is aimed at giving government researchers and the public a close look at trends in this area.
Active travel is also the subject of research being carried out by the Alan Turing Institute. They received funding from the UK government-backed Active Travel England to create local tools that can gather and analyze the data needed to understand and improve the current options in terms of cycle paths and other infrastructure.
These examples show how data is being increasingly used for travel purposes, but there’s still a long way to go before this industry catches up with the other sectors that have already implemented data analysis in many parts of their processes.
