Real-time analytics for creating memorable travel experiences
As one of the leading online travel booking companies in the world, Goibibo provides a range of booking services to over 20+ million happy travelers every month. Over 90 million users have downloaded our app to book hotels, flights, trains, buses, and cars. The secret behind this scale and success is the incredibly customer-centric and data-driven product culture that has helped us innovate fast, remediate issues at lightning speed, and deliver great customer experience.
What does it take to build a great travel platform?
When it comes to the travel industry, user experience, and speed is everything. When someone comes to your travel app, they are looking for more than just convenience. They are looking for the best deal they can get for a memorable trip. At Goibibo, we understand this. That’s why, we strive to be the best in Selection, Price, Reliability, Trust, and Personalization.
Customers are at the heart of everything we do. To deliver a great user experience on our platform we are constantly innovating, adding new features, and implementing new ideas. Data-driven insights are vital for driving our product innovation, operational efficiency, and application performance. All our decisions are guided by data and backed by facts. We are always looking for powerful insights hidden in the complex layers of our transactional data to take customer engagement to the next level.
With the right insights at the right time, you can personalize the user experience, quickly implement competitive pricing strategies, fix supply-side gaps, and drive platform performance. So that your users can plan their trip hassle-free. The challenge lies in finding these key insights in real-time.
The need for real-time analytics in the travel industry
In an ecosystem, where operations are continuous or live 24/7, you cannot leave anything to chance. For monitoring performance, you have to deal with large volumes of transactions daily. This includes customer data from the demand side, as well as data generated by our supply side partners. This means that at any given point of time, your travel platform will be flooded with live data from multiple sources, involving numerous APIs. It is impossible to manually ingest, analyze, or manage such large volumes of streaming data. It is the equivalent of looking for infinity stones in an Avengers movie without any superpowers.
Fortunately, you don’t have to be a mutant with superpowers like Thanos to find insights from streaming data. Artificial intelligence gives you the ability to ingest and analyze monstrous volumes of live data.
Real-time analytics powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning allows you to monitor your live data to detect critical anomalies and patterns that can impact your customers. Be it for identifying new business opportunities or to fix application issues, AI-enabled analysis of hot data gives your team the visibility required to build great products, drive customer experience, and win in a highly competitive market.
The road ahead for real-time analytics in the travel industry
The current times are no doubt challenging for everyone particularly the travel sector. In just a few months, the pandemic has changed us and the world around us drastically. Our lifestyles and habits have evolved. Consumers are still adapting to these changes. Understanding new customer preferences will be critical for any business today.
Real-time data ingestion and analytics mechanisms will continue to help companies in understanding their customer data better and in personalizing the brand experience for each user. With better visibility of market dynamics and knowledge of customer behavior, travel companies will offer more customizations and tailor-made offers suited to unique user preferences.
With a greater focus on sustainable and safe services, there would be more contact-less check-ins. In addition to virtual travel assistants, AI will also enable dynamic cab routes for choosing the safest paths.
As the industry continues to adapt to new customer preferences and market landscape, we will witness new and creative applications of AI in the coming days. The road to success in trying times may seem long and impossible, but in the end persistence and grit always wins. Persistence is the real superpower that makes things possible.
Like Batman said, “Everything’s impossible until somebody does it.”
Watch Webinar: The Goibibo way: Real-time analytics for real user engagement
