Here’s How TUI Boosts Revenue Through Customer Engagement and Experience

As eager travellers begin to make plans to explore the globe once again following the devastation of the COVID-19 crisis, companies in the space are seeking new ways of not only meeting their expectations but exceeding them.

Customers have expectations of travel brands at every stage of the buying process, from the moment they enthusiastically decide they need a holiday, right through the exploring, planning, and purchasing stages, to the moment the plane returns them home after a satisfying trip. The process even goes beyond this moment, with after sales service and follow up engagement also featuring highly in customer expectations.

What then, can travel brands do to make sure they are always hitting the right note with customers?

TUI

As the world’s largest charter airline brand, Britain based TUI Airways Ltd. provides us with some great lessons on meeting and exceeding customer expectation through the way the company manages customer experience and engagement at every stage of the journey.

The process starts with TUI’s unique approach to securing potential customers through personalisation. Eschewing the traditional tour operator model favoured by most of its competitors, TUI has instead opted to establish itself as an integrated holiday experience provider.

By investing in its own product offerings, TUI has the flexibility to craft personalised holiday packages for traveller, which is a big point of difference between it and other brands operating in the same space. A customer not only books their holiday with TUI, but has the company oversee every single part of the experience, including TUI flights, TUI transfers, TUI hotels/cruises, and even TUI activities.

By controlling every aspect of the experience, TUI doesn’t have to place its reputation for exceeding customer expectations in the hands of third-party providers and can take full responsibility for the entire package.

“TUI has strategically moved away from the traditional tour operator model and developed into an integrated provider of Holiday Experiences,” says the company in its strategy. “We have invested in our own product offerings, enabling us to create unique holidays for our customers. This means our customers receive a holistic and seamless experience, while TUI receives more accurate information about what our customers truly want, helping our aim to further facilitate individualised offerings.”#

Customer Experience

To make sure it fully understands the experience had by its customers, TUI leans heavily on net promoter scores. However, measuring customer satisfaction in this way only provides part of the picture which has led TUI to deploy further data gather methods to fully understand the online customer journey and uncover deeper insights into engagement, conversion, and navigation.

Working in collaboration with trusted analytics partners – Station10 and Decibel – TUI was able to take its first party data relating to customer journeys through the holiday booking funnel, highlighting attributes such as: number of successful searches, errors, and progression to checkout and blend it with Decibel’s DXS data which tracked every session from the TUI website over the space of two months – a total of eleven million individual browsing sessions.

Through this data, TUI was able to implement changes which brought up the experience being felt by those with middling customer experience scores and improve the probability of conversion by up to 50%, which translates to an additional £20 million in annualised revenue for the company.

“We can focus on customer issues highlighted by low scores and feed those hypotheses to product teams for development and testing,” said Head of Analytics at Station10, Hirra Sulanki. “DXS provides a scientific and measurable way of continuously improving our CX levels.”

Final Thoughts

The way TUI manages customer engagement and experience, by using data intelligently and making sure it oversees the entire journey, means it is able to reliably and consistently exceed traveller expectations.

You can hear directly from Isabelle Droll, CIO of  TUI Airline as she discusses How To Build a Customer-Centric Digital Experience Across All Touchpoints that Delights Travellers & Drives Revenue at Digital Travel EU, being held in November at The Tower Hotel, London.

Download the agenda today for more information and insights.