Travel and hospitality is a multi-billion dollar industry reliant on disposable income, time for leisure, and complete customer satisfaction. There was an estimated $972 billion spent on domestic tourism in 2019. Air travel, accommodations, outdoor recreation, and food service represent 50% of the gross domestic output in the hospitality and travel industry. Additionally, the hotel and motel industry is responsible for $206 million dollars of that revenue. With these numbers, it’s clear that there is a lot of room for growth in your organization.
The travel and hospitality industry is as essential as ever, but it certainly has to overcome some unique challenges including globalization, intense competition, sustainability, technological advancements, and pandemic restrictions. It, like many industries, has also evolved into a heavily digitized one, most notably with online bookings.
To meet the demands of the digital age, as well as to compete in highly competitive markets, many have had to adapt and pivot on the fly. Before we dig deeper into the challenges of the industry as a whole: What are the challenges you face in your travel and hospitality company?
While automation and digitization in the travel and hospitality industry makes competing more complex, it also helps organizations lower their costs per visit, extends their reach, and essentially improves sale effectiveness by delighting customers when they do it well!
Other broad challenges facing the travel and hospitality industry include alignment across teams and suppliers, targeting the right customer in the right way, communicating visually and across different demographics simultaneously, and being able to measure and analyze their productivity and profitability as well as their attributions.
Let’s dive deeper into the alignment challenges that a number of companies are facing. Cross department alignment is a problem across many industries, and it is no different in the travel and hospitality industry.
Companies know they need to provide consistent, high-quality customer experiences, but aren’t sure how to achieve that on a consistent basis. Likewise, they need the technology to create solutions across multiple suppliers and to minimize time dumps by eliminating redundant tasks across the organization.
Because customers have a number of choices, travel and hospitality companies have been tasked with helping them wade through a multitude of booking options. Companies need to target their audience carefully based on the types of individualized travel packages they offer and have tools to personalize their communications.
As mentioned, travel and hospitality companies need to reach out and resonate with a variety of different traveler personas, and they have to utilize social channels with inspiring visual content to reach and motivate engagement and ultimately, leads. While many companies are doing this, it is about doing it well and actually reaching your target audience.
Reporting is key to solving for the above challenges. Companies must become more efficient and reliant on digital analytics in order to gain insights and a 360 view of their target market. Likewise, the industry has antiquated operations which contribute to a great deal of wasted time on manual tasks. Finally, travel and hospitality companies need effective reporting tools to determine if their campaigns are profitable.
Before we offer some solutions to these challenges, let’s look at the industry a little closer. The predicted value of global luxury travel in 2027 is expected to exceed $1.2 billion with 80% of travel bookings presently being completed online. Likewise, 20% of travel focused emails are opened. What does that mean for you?
Here are some key expectations that the average travel and hospitality buyer wants. They want information, and they want to feel inspired. Do you inspire your buyer? They need to remember you, and you need to be trustworthy. To do that you have to foster consistent and personalized communications. Especially in this day and age, travelers need to know that they will be updated and notified of any changes in real time, almost before anything happens. Finally, ease of use for searching, planning, and traveling with one singular, highly intuitive mobile app or website is essential.
HubSpot’s CRM platform has all the tools and integrations you need to solve for the many challenges mentioned above. HubSpot was created so that never again do you have multiple platforms you’re trying to force to work together, and instead everyone is operating from one single source of truth. Likewise, each one is intuitive and easy to use for the ultimate customer experience. Each product in the HubSpot CRM platform is powerful alone, but the real magic happens when you use them together.
HubSpot helps you to create a connected customer experience for individuals and companies seeking your services. It allows you to automate and unify your sales, marketing, and service teams so everyone is on the same page. It allows you to create workflows that make communication more efficient, while at the same time tracking them to ensure all leads are followed-through and buyer’s needs are met.
Sales Hub, Marketing Hub, Service Hub, CMS Hub, and Operations Hub are each part of HubSpot’s connected CRM platform to help you grow better. When you use two or more hubs together, your data is automatically connected on the platform, enabling you to easily (and powerfully) track your entire customer journey from first website visit, to closed deal, to happy customer.
Sales Hub
HubSpot Sales Hub is a time-saving sales CRM that provides you with an in-depth 360 degree view of your prospects, while minimizing busy work and giving your sales team time to close deals. Sales Hub can also help you leverage documents, and track bids and proposals, ensuring the right follow-up communications occur. Sales Hub helps you track revenue by deal stage across various pipelines. Create email onboarding sequences to automate deal stage communications and reduce manual follow-up for recurring communications. And, that is just the tip of the iceberg.
Rather than using multiple tools to accomplish each of these tasks separately, HubSpot’s sales software enables teams to do all their work under one roof. Save time and energy by using a single tool, rather than splitting up your team’s energy (and information) across multiple platforms..
Marketing Hub
HubSpot Marketing Hub is a CRM-powered marketing platform that allows you to create, manage, and track your marketing campaigns. It provides everything you need to get found, connect with new prospects, and nurture them into buyers.
With Marketing Hub, all your marketing tools and data are in one place, so you don’t have to juggle multiple solutions and waste time stitching together reporting. It’s deeply powerful and easy to use. Last but not least, you can easily sync Marketing Hub with more than 1,250 custom integrations so your marketing team has all its favorite tools on one platform.
Popular features in HubSpot’s marketing software include the ability to:
- Build personalized, automated email campaigns
- Track marketing performance with built-in analytics and custom reporting
- Manage all your social media accounts in one place
- Design and host SEO optimized blog posts and web pages
- Get your whole team speaking with one voice with campaign management tools
Service Hub
Service Hub allows you to provide superior customer service. Among other things, it allows you to manage the onboarding of new customers, collect, organize, and respond to customer support requests, and ensure the growth and satisfaction of your customers.
While most customer service software solutions solve for a specific use case, Service Hub is unique in its connection to the HubSpot CRM platform. With features that make it easy to deliver authentic, personalized service, Service Hub empowers you to prioritize the customer experience.
CMS Hub
CMS Hub is a content management system (CMS) that facilitates creating, managing, and modifying information on a website. With a CMS, your developers can build flexible, beautiful website themes that your marketing team can use to make website updates on their own, creating and personalizing your website for every visitor.
HubSpot’s CMS Hub allows marketers to take ownership over their website. You won’t have to worry about security concerns or broken pages, freeing you up to focus on the experience you’re providing customers instead. And with flexible themes, you can ensure your brand and design stay consistent across pages.
Operations Hub
The Operations Hub seamlessly integrates with all the tools above, and allows you to connect data and automate processes for a friction-free experience between your teams. You are essentially aligning large amounts of data around a secure, single source of truth and presenting it in a clean, consistent, and easily accessible manner. Likewise, the Operations Hub helps you streamline processes that allow you to reduce manual work while at the same time personalizing your messaging and improving customer experience.
Wondering if HubSpot is right for you? Schedule a call with Carrie Gallagher at Lovable Marketing and learn how to start generating and nurturing the right leads for your business.