Web Data and the online travel business

Do you remember when booking

travel used to be like this?

Everything is now onlineThe online travel industry is in the midst of a major transformation. Thanks to technological advancements and digital trends, the entire consumer travel buying experience can now be through the web.

Visibility into availability, convenient bookings, rise in customers’ trust in online payment, and the ability to easily compare travel options are major factors expected to drive growth of the global online travel booking market.

The global online travel market is expected to grow at over 10% CAGR and hit $1 trillion dollars by 2022.

Along with this growth is competition. It includes not only the major players but also thousands of small and mid-size agencies all trying to get a piece of the travel pie.

For online travel providers, data represents a key strategic differentiator. The web provides an unprecedented opportunity for the online travel business. Web data offers a wealth of dynamic information for making more informed business decisions to drive positive outcomes.

Online Travel Companies are Taking NoticeEver since the internet made the whole industry transparent, companies have been using technology to build a business or gain an edge.

Whether you are a hotel, vacation rental or car rental agency, having continuous knowledge of your competitors’ price and product offerings, recognizing changes to the marketplace, and acting quickly but strategically are instrumental to the success of your company.

Using web data, travel companies can discover the hottest travel destinations and understand traveler’s origins and preferences and use that information to optimize revenue management, eliminate revenue leakage, track pricing and occupancy rates and identify where to focus on marketing and promotional efforts.

High perceived business & legal risk

Stand alone data

Time consuming to get new data

Resource intensive & specialized skills

Poor quality, unreliable, dirty data The traditional method for extracting data from websites and making it machine-readable is known as web scraping. Web scraping projects are complicated, expensive and labor-intensive. They require organizations to employ engineers to write custom software for every type of web page that they want to target.

In addition to engineers, subject matter experts are needed to conduct extensive quality checks.

Web scraping projects are also not resilient to change on the target websites and they break easily due to its rigid extraction rules that are hard-coded.

Invariably, traditional web scraping leaves organizations with data that’s incomplete, inaccurate, unreliable, and out of date—while introducing high costs and business risk.

The problem with web scraping

Web Data Integration is a new approach to acquiring and managing web data that focuses on data quality and control. Web Data Integration treats the entire web data lifecycle as a single, integrated process composed of the following steps:

• Identification of data sources and requirements.

• Web data extraction.

• Data preparation and cleansing.

• Data integration and consumption by downstream applications and business processes.

• Analysis and visualization.

The purpose of adopting a Web Data Integration strategy is to allow the enterprise to build products and services on web data with confidence and without worrying about data quality or reliability issues.

Identify

Extract

Prepare

Integrate

Consume

Which vacation marketplace have high occupancy rates and ADRs?

Who has more properties?

Who has the biggest share of bookings?

How is the demand for the upcoming travel season?

How do I get visibility into inventory movement by

location or market?

Which company is running promotions in particular

locations?

Where are travelers traveling from and to, and when are they traveling?

Availability

Reviews

Bookings

Rates Property

Listings

Travel

Trends

Promotions

What types of questions can web data answer?

A vacation rentals example

How are online travel providers leveraging web data?

Competitive & Market Intelligence For online travel providers, it’s important to stay ahead of competitors by automating the harvesting of market data to get visibility of emerging travel trends, benchmark property performance and drive additional revenue.

With web data you can gain insights into competitive listings, benchmark competitive pricing, and identify the most profitable locations. The availability of this data and the ability to act it in time could certainly be the difference that propels one ahead of its competition.

Get visibility to all properties and prices, and be alerted to price changes on an hourly, daily, or weekly.

Competitive Price MonitoringFor many online travel shoppers, price is a key decision criteria. They have the freedom and choice to switch between vendors as they please. Because of this, online travel companies should make it a priority to understand the dynamics of both your own pricing and your competitor’s pricing to ensure you’re competitively positioned in the market.

• Visibility into competitive offerings enables pricing optimization so you can stay ahead of the competition and win market share.

• Perform comparative pricing analysis by getting visibility into the future availability and pricing of competing properties, rental cars, parking costs or rideshare fees in target areas

• Track how many properties have been booked and at what price.

Gain Market IntelligenceSales and marketing teams can leverage web data to determine their ideal customer profiles, generate leads, create data-driven content, monitor search engine rankings, and much more. Web data helps them understand the kinds of deals and packages their competition is providing to the market and the costs and locations the consumer prefers.

Get daily extractions of data from online travel or rental listing websites to better focus marketing and promotional efforts. Harness granular data over time to dig deeper into trends and uncover insights about travelers and their travel patterns.

Monitor Customer SentimentOnline travel and hospitality businesses publish customer reviews of their properties or products. It’s easy to access the reviews and see overall average scores, but this only offers limited intelligence. What if the aggregate scores are the same across competitors? For example, what if every large hotel in a certain market has three stars?

It’s time-consuming and difficult to read through 1000s of reviews in order to determine what differentiates offerings, let alone to gain actionable intelligence based on all this information.

Web Data Integration helps simplify the effort to leverage social media data by helping you gain deeper insights into customer feedback and expectations, so you can take steps to protect your brand and improve customer loyalty.

Competitive IntelligenceLarge Online Travel Provider

An online travel provider uses Import.io to monitor target websites and extract details on new properties, whether that’s price, the number of bedrooms, or aggregate customer reviews. The company can even get booking level data, which is usually hidden behind user interactions. Logic may then be created around entities moving between available to unavailable, or price changes, to better understand how competitors are positioning their properties. Finally, the company can create comprehensive tables, on demand, of all properties and when they’re available for booking.

With Import.io, they can now

• assess demand levels based on quote level data and calendar availability for targeted properties

• collect and maintain competitor property detail and available day data for properties across all regions globally.

• track property list changes (adds, deletes, and changes) on competitor websites.

• understand market share in terms of overall volume and number of properties.

Online travel providers rely on Import.io for web data to

ü Differentiate from the competition by better understanding their market, competitors, and customers.

ü Identify lucrative markets for expansion by tracking occupancy and daily rates of properties across all channels.

ü Maximize revenue by optimizing pricing models based on property inventory, availability and pricing data.

ü Build greater customer loyalty by ensuring a superior customer experience with optimized rates and products.

ü Protect their brand using customer reviews to gain insights and make improvements.

Web data can give you the extra intelligence you need to outperform the competition and stay on top of dynamic markets.

Contact a Data Expert

Web Data and the online travel business