There are a variety of ways of building trust with consumers and each online travel company must play to its strengths. (5/25/2007)
For its part, Cheapflights builds trust by offering the most relevant deals, the greatest overview of the marketplace, including more deals and using travel experts to pick amazing deals from any company that has them, according to Hugo Burge, Vice Chairman and Head of International, Cheapflights Limited.
“Other companies may build trust by offering a much more personalised experience and offering information targetted to your previous purchases or specific attributes of your searches. There is no golden rule and different things will work with different models,” said Burge.
Sharing info on recent initiatives taken by Cheapflights in CRM arena, Burge said, “Actually, as a search engine we really have a one-size fits all results approach, so we are not pioneers in CRM by any means. CRM is a channel to build relevance and loyalty. Cheapflights approaches this by offering a great diversity of deals and complex information in a very simple format. We segment our subscriber list in rather simple ways, predominantly by departure point. However, we are getting more sophisticated starting to use Mosaic, TrueTouch and TGI to profile our users, which appears to be trailing well over the last few months. We have further plans for tuning content relevancy based on user preferences over the coming months based on our learning but I don’t have any specific analysis to share at this time.”
There’s a huge asset to being an online agency because loads of data can be compiled – shopping, purchase, etc. – which can be converted into sales leads.
On how online travel companies or specifically Cheapflights are capitalising on the same, he said, “I believe that one of the largest trends and most valuable things that online travel companies can do is follow up on the experience that one of their consumers has had on a trip. Online travel agencies were slow to seek and retain consumer reviews for their customers trips but this is changing. This is incredibly useful, not only to measure satisfaction, show that you care and react upon the information but also to present this information to other consumers.”
