Travellers binned the brochures to book themselves – so how do marketers reach them?

Not so long ago, booking a holiday was a simple – if not entirely stress-free – excursion that lifted off one winter afternoon and followed a fairly predictable flight path. After watching a few sun-drenched ads during Home & Away, mum and dad would drag the family to the travel agent, hulk home a stack of brochures, squabble over the pros of cons of Bali vs Byron Bay, consult with nan on the phone, trek back to town for some more literature, before deciding that, actually, it’s probably just best to return to the same all-inclusive as last year.

From left to right: Mumbrella’s Adam Thorn with Sojern’s Chris Greenwood and Matt Harris talking at a sponsored Bespoke breakfast in Melbourne

Today, it’s very different. “There were probably 350 touchpoints in the path to purchase three years ago,” explains Chris Greenwood, director of sales ANZ for travel ad platform Sojern. “Now we can see it’s often more than 700. Technology has completely changed the research and booking process for consumers.”

On the surface, that means we’re now often inspired by Instagram influencers, plump for Airbnbs over hotels and book with our thumbs. But more significantly, those changes have had the knock-on effect of transforming the type and frequency of holidays we take. Shorter breaks are more common, we’re less afraid to go it alone and we’re more inclined to personalise every aspect of our trip. And because no one person has the same customer journey, argues Greenwood, a marketer’s job can feel impossible.

“It becomes kind of exasperating,” agrees Sojern’s global VP of product, Matt Harris. “Because a decade ago, marketers thought, ‘Wow, we can see who visited a website and made a purchase.’ But now, it’s all blown up because you have different devices and social networks. Marketers have certain pieces of information, but not others.”

Greenwood and Harris are speaking at Mumbrella and Sojern’s breakfast briefing in Melbourne. The pair are here because their expertise is essentially attempting to demystify the enigma of a traveller’s complex and winding path to purchase. The platform does so by collecting real-time anonymous data from airlines, travel agents, hotels and rental car companies so marketers can target its 350 million traveller profiles during the golden window between swotting up and booking. For instance, they can tell when a specific anonymous consumer is researching destinations when they’ve finally booked their accommodation, if they’re planning optional extras and when they’re returning home. The right ads can then be placed in front of the right eyeballs at the right time.

Sojern then uses this information to publish regular reports and whitepapers to reveal hard statistics on how the industry is rapidly being disrupted and debunk myths. For instance, in the APAC region, its studies reveal 60% of searches happen only two months before the date of departure; two-thirds of searches are for breaks of seven days or less; and 45% of research takes place on mobile. Travel behaviour towards Christmas, meanwhile, is radically different than in other months, but intent peaks during January, March and August.

It reveals more intriguing facts, too. Despite the chaos, Greenwood explains, consumers like to research aspects of their trip together but there is always clear order of booking. First flights, then accommodation and finally car rental and other accommodation. “But not usually in the same sitting. Rather, there are certain periods of time when they are in-market for particular travel verticals.”

Sojern’s Chris Greenwood

But despite the clear changes to how we book and travel, marketers’ dollars, Harris argues, often don’t follow consumers. Businesses have over-invested in traditional linear and under-invested in digital. It’s a paradox because in digital you can track and prove ROI in ways you can’t with an out-of-home poster or TVC. Meanwhile, consumers, says Greenwood, don’t want content that isn’t suitable for the particular device they’re using at any given moment. “Programmatic has made a lot of strides in making ad units more accessible in multiple formats, particularly around video. However, in future, we’ll see new formats more relevant to mobile. And you’ll probably then get different kind of results than previously seen.”

The other issue is with marketers taking the shortcut of relying on externally controlled social media sites – or “walled gardens” as they’re now dubbed for their propensity to lure consumers in without letting them easily navigate away. “You can’t apply your learnings from one network to another,” argues Harris. “So the coin of the realm in Facebook is the Facebook ID, but in the Google world it’s Google ID – yet they don’t talk to each other. It is almost impossible for you as an advertiser to make a lot of sense out of what happens.

“The world that’s coming is a world where there will be dozens and dozens of walled gardens around all kinds of unique content. Anywhere where you could have a deterministic idea, the connection to consumers, and a reason to reach them, is going to be through some kind of a new separate channel. So making sense of that is going to be hard. But you probably won’t have to worry about all the attribution and measurement and things that you do because you won’t be able to do much with that anyway.”

Finally, argues Harris, it’s becoming more important still as AI and voice technology take off. In voice, the danger is that only the top search result will be read out – dealing a huge threat to challenger brands. “The idea of discovering something you didn’t know or something that wasn’t patterned for you, is going to be really tough. Because we all sort of live in this self-reinforcing echo chamber where we’re told what we want to hear and we see what we want to see and we’re given what we expected to receive.”

“The really hard thing is going be that there won’t be a lot of room for serendipity anymore.”