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.
The HubSpot Customer Platform
HubSpot is an AI-powered customer platform that connects your marketing, sales, customer service, content, data, and revenue processes around one shared CRM.
Instead of forcing separate systems and disconnected data to work together, HubSpot gives your teams a shared view of your prospects and customers. Marketing can see what’s happening in sales. Sales can see the marketing activity that led to a conversation. Service teams have the context of the entire customer relationship. And automation can connect processes across all of them.
At the center of the platform is HubSpot Smart CRM, which connects your customer data across HubSpot’s products. HubSpot’s Breeze AI tools are also integrated throughout the platform to help teams automate work, create and analyze content, research prospects and customers, and use CRM data more effectively.
HubSpot’s six core products are Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, Content Hub, Data Hub, and Revenue Hub. Each can be used on its own, but the real power comes from using them together because they share the same CRM and customer data.
Sales Hub
Sales Hub is HubSpot’s AI-powered sales software for building pipeline and closing deals.
Sales teams can manage contacts and companies, build deal pipelines, automate follow-up with sequences and workflows, track sales activity, forecast revenue, score leads, create playbooks, and manage prospecting from one connected workspace.
Because Sales Hub is built on HubSpot Smart CRM, your sales team can also see the marketing, service, and other customer activity surrounding each relationship instead of working from an isolated sales database.
Marketing Hub
Marketing Hub brings your marketing data, campaigns, automation, and lead generation tools together with your CRM.
You can use Marketing Hub to create and automate email campaigns, build forms and landing pages, manage campaigns and social media, segment audiences, score leads, personalize communications, and measure how marketing activity contributes to leads and revenue.
HubSpot is also increasingly incorporating AI into Marketing Hub, including AI-powered lead generation, campaign creation, automation, and tools that help marketers understand how buyers are discovering their brands through both traditional search and AI-generated answers.
Service Hub
Service Hub connects customer service and customer success with the rest of the customer journey.
Teams can manage support through HubSpot’s help desk and ticketing tools, create a knowledge base, collect customer feedback, route requests, track service performance, and manage customer success and retention.
Service Hub also includes AI-powered tools such as Customer Agent, which can answer customer questions and take actions using your business and CRM data. Because service activity lives alongside marketing and sales data, your team has a much more complete picture of each customer relationship.
Content Hub
Content Hub replaced what was previously known as CMS Hub and expands HubSpot’s website tools into a broader AI-powered content marketing platform.
In addition to building and managing websites, landing pages, and blogs, Content Hub includes tools for content creation, personalization, repurposing, podcasts, video, reporting, and content management.
HubSpot is also bringing answer engine optimization into Content Hub with HubSpot AEO, which helps businesses understand how their brands appear when buyers ask questions in AI tools and identify opportunities to improve that visibility.
Data Hub
Data Hub is the evolution of what was previously Operations Hub. It’s designed to help businesses connect, clean, organize, and activate data across HubSpot and the rest of their technology stack.
Data Hub includes data syncing, data quality tools, automation, reporting, and tools for combining first- and third-party data. It can also help connect HubSpot with external data sources and maintain cleaner, more consistent CRM data.
This becomes increasingly important as businesses use more AI because the quality of the results you get from AI depends heavily on the quality and completeness of the underlying data.
Revenue Hub
Revenue Hub is HubSpot’s connected system for managing the revenue process, including quoting, contracts, billing, and payments.
Revenue Hub is the evolution of Commerce Hub, expanding HubSpot’s commerce tools beyond payments and billing into a broader quote-to-cash process.
Because this information lives alongside your CRM data, sales, service, and finance processes can stay connected to the customer relationship instead of operating from separate systems.
What about HubSpot’s AI tools?
AI isn’t really a separate Hub. Breeze, HubSpot’s collection of AI tools, is integrated throughout the customer platform.
Depending on the HubSpot products and features you’re using, AI can help with everything from prospecting and customer service to content creation, data analysis, automation, research, and CRM work.
HubSpot is also expanding its AI agent capabilities so businesses can use agents to perform work using the context and data already stored in HubSpot.
Wondering if HubSpot is right for your business?
Choosing the right HubSpot products and figuring out how they should work together depends on your business, your existing technology, and what you’re trying to accomplish.
If you’re considering HubSpot, I can help you determine what you actually need and provide hands-on HubSpot onboarding to configure the platform around your business.
If you’re already using HubSpot and need help with automation, integrations, CRM cleanup, custom objects, reporting, training, or another specific challenge, take a look at my one-off HubSpot projects.
And if you’re not quite sure what kind of help you need, schedule a 15-minute HubSpot consultation and tell me what you’re working on.