When it comes to travel, we all want a memorable and wonderful experience. Thanks to online travel apps, vacation destinations are just a click away. With a single app, you can conveniently book your entire trip including hotel reservations, best flights, and cabs for sightseeing. Ever wondered how travel apps deliver customized packages from multiple operators, give us personalized recommendations, and enable fast booking services- all on a platform that is live 24/7?

To learn more, we invited Rithish Saralaya (VP of Engineering at Goibibo) and Bhaskar Chaudhary (Vice President, Online Product at Goibibo) to our latest webinar session. Goibibo is one of India’s leading travel companies with over 90 million app downloads and 20+ million MAUs. In this article, we have summarized the key insights and takeaways discussed in the webinar session.

Customer experience is everything

Superior speed, application performance, and user experience are critical to the success of travel apps. To deliver the best in terms of Selection, Price, Reliability, Trust, and Personalization, Goibibo relies on its unique customer-centric and data-driven strategy. These strategies have helped the team to drive the operational efficiency, performance, and personalization required to scale their business in terms of app downloads, user engagement, and the number of monthly active users.

Artificial intelligence for analyzing streaming data

In a complex ecosystem like online travel that involves large volumes of behavioral and transactional data, advanced analytical capabilities are a must. With over 20 million MAUs a month and over a million DUs, Goibibo generates massive volumes of live data every day. The team leverages AI-enabled mechanisms to harness this streaming data in real-time for addressing multiple business use cases including forecasting, classification, and personalized recommendations.

Business use cases of AI-enabled analytics in the travel industry

Artificial intelligence is a powerful tool that enables travel companies to monitor multiple business KPIs in real-time. With AI-enabled analytics, companies can forecast flight fares, optimize customer support, conduct sentiment analysis, implement dynamic pricing, dynamic persuasion, and fix critical application issues in real-time. Here is how Goibibo leverages AI-enabled analytics to drive customer experience:

1. AI for Dynamic Persuasion and conversions

According to Accenture, 91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands that deliver personalized and relevant recommendations. Think about the number of times you got tempted to watch a series that Netflix recommended based on your previous preferences and activities. Imagine the same concept while booking your trip.

AI-driven analytics helps you in understanding your customers better. You get insights into what each customer segment is looking for and their buyer’s journey. This information is useful to deliver offers and communication that is most relevant to a specific customer segment. AI makes a granular level of targeting possible by giving you real-time insights to upsell/ cross-sell relevant products and drive conversions. It allows you to put out the right information to the right user to persuade them to make informed purchasing decisions. Well-timed and relevant suggestions can drive bookings on your travel platform.

AI-enabled insights help Goibibo in personalizing the listing experience, improving product discoverability, driving contextual recommendations, and in creating an engaging app experience. The team used AI-powered systems to identify new opportunities to drive CX. One such enhancement was the merging of reviews and traveler screens to showcase more information to users. The team could also provide customization and alerts based on various elements such as social signals, desired price range, previous trips, and demand/supply trends.

2. Eliminate the risk of online fraud

In the travel industry, there is a lot of sensitive customer information including personal and financial information. Real-time monitoring of transactions is critical for eliminating security risks and threats such as fraud and theft. AI enables travel companies to autonomously monitor large volumes of financial transactions in real-time, alerting stakeholders to incidents that need attention. Teams can detect critical issues in real-time such as data theft, identity theft, cybercrime, phishing attempts, unauthorized fund transfers, and misuse of promotional offers by fake users. By identifying abnormal incidents in real-time, companies can take the necessary remedial steps to make their travel platform safer for users.

3. Dynamic pricing for better revenue management

Price is a big factor when it comes to buying decisions in the travel space. To stay competitive, companies must update their pricing strategy constantly. This means monitoring multiple dynamic factors such as demand which fluctuates according to seasons or festivals, availability of services on the supply side, offers by competitors, discounts to be given to the most loyal users, etc. With an optimized pricing strategy, travel companies can manage their revenue better.

Goibibo leverages dynamic pricing technology powered by artificial intelligence to analyze the various market factors in real-time to display the right price to the right users at the right time. With advanced analytics, Goibibo could thus get real-time visibility and insights to know their customers better, drive personalized recommendations, detect threats, and manage pricing strategies.

AI essentially enables a proactive approach to data analysis, allowing travel companies to autonomously monitor and remediate incidents in real-time before travelers face any significant issues. Travel companies can leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve their application performance and customer experience exponentially. In the end, your brand’s success is determined by the quality of the customer experience you deliver.

Key Takeaways

• Be razor-sharp in monitoring and detecting how good your performance metrics are
• Customers are at the heart of everything. Be customer-centric in everything you do
• Invest in modern AIOps for monitoring streaming data
• Leverage real-time data-driven insights for personalization
• Use AI and ML to optimize pricing
• Focus on optimizing operations to resolve roadblocks in real-time

“A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all” - Michael Leboeuf

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Rohit Maheshwari

Rohit Maheshwari is the Head of Strategy and Products at CrunchMetrics. He is responsible for delivering business growth using innovation and product strategy. He leverages his expertise in artificial intelligence (AI), analytics and digital services to contribute to Subex’s solutions and enables its clients to build new offerings, drive business growth and deliver great customer experience.