This is the first year where travel and hospitality is a core and strategic vertical.

Stats:

1. 50% of your customers start their travel journey with no brand in mind
2. 100% of your customers expect a to be remembered by their airline or hotel

This is about “marketing” beyond marketing. In other words, support the entire experience, not just a lead.  If you have a flow that includes:

• Dreaming
• Research
• Booking
• Prepare
• Experience
• Loyalty

Then you should treat them like you know them throughout that cycle.

Quote: In general, our biggest issues would be the every rising customer expectations driven by technology. (Best Western CEO David Kong)

Three themes:

1. To win the future, you need to optimize convenience.
2. It’s about mobility……. not just mobile. You need to evaluate your mobile platform at the user level
3. Marketing and technology teams need to be connected.

Julie Hoffman – MGM Interview

Julie is a Senior Executive Director at MGM.  MGM is an Entertainment company.  They are NOT a technology company.  Memory is important but it takes amplification and frequency to move from short term to long term memory.   Correlate this to MGM’s goal to build great experiences.  MGM co-creates in their customers experience.

Question: How does convenience play into the customer journey

Time is the ultimate short commodity.  You only have so much of it. You cannot afford to waste their time on the phone choosing options. The burden does not belong to the customer.  MGM wants to take the burden back.

Question: How has MGM done their transformation

Started with a customer experience committee. We formed a vision and a strategy.  That led to alignment by organization with a Chief Experience Officer and a continuing journey

Question: What is the one thing Marketers in this industry need to do?

Realize that there is a whole community there to help.  This is cross-industry. Lots of people are willing to help.

Future Vision in Technology

Showed a video on a completely integrated experience

• Checkin
• See your friends who are also in town
• order room service from your phone
• Your phone is key
• Housekeeping users their app to see your preferences and whether you are in your room
• Extend your stay and book a concert
• Visit the spa with points
• etc.

This was all created using a storyscape approach that combines brand strategy, product placement, customer experience, to create the journey.

He showed a travel experience cloud. It’s a dense slide put into key streams:

1. Analytics
2. traveler touchpoints
3. platofmr services
4. relationship management services (media buy, booking, pricing, etc)
5. Core systems

This is a nice way to combine all the pieces and parts.

Stats: 95% want to deliver a great customer experience. 80% say they deliver a superior experience.  Only 8% of customers feel they receive a customer experience.  (Closing the delivery gap study by Bain)

There’s a lot of room for improvement.

From — To

Channels and Platforms to Experiences

Silo-ed moments to ongoing journey

Bookings to Trips

Messaging to Engagement

Isolated Scores to Holistic Measurement

Employees to Heroes

Travelers to People

Chad Westfall of IHG : Reinventing Digital Content Delivery

Chad shared a personal experience.   He was speaking at a Marketing Symposium and had a taxi experience where the cab driver had to use a really large map book just to find his destination……… all while the meter was ticking.  Chad contrasted this with Uber and the connected experience.  Chad felt very uncomfortable in this disconnected world.

In 2014, IHG’s digital channel surpassed $5 billion in sales.  That’s 20% of overall sales. 360 million visits to the website.

IHG’s Challenge: not giving a rich experience to their customers.

They have to do it in 16 languages, 200 countries, a heavy stack that hampers ability to make change.  On top of that, page delivery performance was abysmal.

Reinvention

1. system architecture
   1. realized they needed to completely separate commerce from content
   2. Decoupled the system, modularized the code, and enabled new delivery systems outside of the commerce component
   3. Deployment: used akamai to cache the content
2. how we interact with systems
   1. AEM
   2. Business creates content
3. localization process
   1. Brought in Smartling as a translation partner.  This tool had to support unified translation memory and supported automation of translation
4. global delivery model
   1. akamai caching

Results:

• 65% reducstion in delivery time
• 75% reduction in language rollout

Hotel Experience

IHG just stared an implementation of Adobe Audience Manger to create that experience in the hotel. It’s just the start of the journey.