Today’s leading travel players must reinvent their value propositions and improve every experience, if they wish to engage and best serve the digital traveller. The growth opportunities and opportunity costs in Digital Travel are vast as the latest study of eMarketer illustrates where worldwide digital travel revenues will surpass $533 Billion in 2015, and the 2016 outlook is double-digit growth.
The tourism sector has been fundamentally re-architected with social media, mobile and ecommerce strategies over this past decade. Success in this digital ecosystem demands that a chief marketing officer or travel entrepreneur, must understand the latest digital dynamics and underlying technology that are transforming business by dramatically altering the way people communicate, create, collaborate, share information, purchase and complete other transactions.
All travel marketing and consumer experience professionals must understand how the new consumer - traveller is becoming increasingly digital in every journey stage (dreaming, planning, booking, feeling, sharing, reviewing), in every travel purchase. The latest trends show how approximately 50% of digital travellers get inspired by looking at pictures and comments online, and over a 70% review videos and opinions before making their final decision.
Professor Kevin Sigliano of IE Business School and digital tourism expert, explains that “all of the digital and customer journey trends mean that travel enterprises with customer centric strategies and willingness to innovate have a unique opportunity to understand, build, service and sell more effectively to the new connected consumer”. Hence it is critical for all travel players to implement disruptive digital strategies driving engagement, share of mind and maximizing conversion mobile rates, as well as redefining the customer journey understanding and improved micro-segmentation campaigns.
Today’s travel professional must also understand and conquer all of the newest branding, acquisition and life time value digital techniques with a growth hacking culture in order to gain the maximum user traction and revenues.
The Digital Tourism program of IE Executive Education will enable the participants to understand the “digital tourist” and how to market effectively when developing new marketing strategies, as well conquering the main digital techniques (paid media, mobile, social media, content, listening …). Leading tourism and digital experts, as well as best practices of leading travel companies (Tripadvisor, Google, Room Mates Hotels, Destinia, Bla Bla Car, Amadeus, Turismoi, …) have been key in designing this renewed Digital Travel course. The alumni have pointed out that the program provides the right mix between innovation, practical cases, analytics and methodologies.
Specifically, Natalia Bayona of ProColombia points out that “the Digital Tourism Program at IE allowed me to develop the strategy for promoting Colombia as a tourist destination, through studying the best practices of the travel industry, the use of big data, consumer patterns via mobile phones, and the latest digital strategies.”
This innovative course provides participants with a roadmap to address the main challenges of travel where digital marketing and excellence in customer journey are the key success drivers. The practical sessions will address the real opportunities of the travel sector and respond to the needs of the traveller. Through the adoption of different roles, participants will be able to design an effective digital travel transformation strategy.
Finally, this 4 day course is also an opportunity to meet great professionals of the travel sector and share views and network. Chairman Juan José Güemes of the IE Entrepreneurship & Innovation Center points out that “today’s travel traditional company must disrupt and adopt innovative startup strategies if they want to compete effectively in the new cognitive and digital era.” Hence it is clear that the learning journey in digital tourism never ends and only the best strategies engage and wow the traveller generating the desired financial and business results.