Online Travel Demands Many Digital Touch-points in Multiple Languages

Localization and translation has never been so important for the travel and hospitality sector. Travelers and experience-seekers now have access to volumes of digitized content and online information. Given the number of steps involved in today’s online travel purchase, booking sites are faced with the challenge of making their process and sites as sticky as possible. Travel and hospitality is an incredibly busy and competitive industry. According to Millward Brown, users booking holidays online visit travel sites 38 times in the 45 days before booking. The path to purchase is extremely competitive for views, clicks and the ultimate “buy now” button, if you are an online travel company.

When you search and book for that perfect holiday or travel experience, there can be many steps and touchpoints in the booking process. The number of touchpoints leading to, through and after your travel purchase can vary. According to Webtrends, frequent travelers, big spenders (those spending more than $6,000 per year), early tech adopters and mobile travel shoppers use more touchpoints than average. They also do more research before booking. The more personalized and easy-to-use the online travel booking journey, that is accessible from multiple devices, the more opportunity for increased conversions and increased revenue. This makes it so important to deliver image and local language content, published accurately to the right audience, at the right time for ALL digital touchpoints.

Companies like TripAdvisor, Expedia, Booking.com, Hotels.com, Ebookers, Orbitz and Travelocity, all publish content in multiple languages. If they did not, they could lose market share. Welocalize client, TripAdvisor, operates websites in 45 countries and in 28 different languages and many of their 250 million posted reviews go through the Welocalize translation process.

A good, ideally centralized, localization process not only enables greater reach, it also provides huge amounts of real-time data that can be used to map trends and make the online experience immediately relevant. If a customer is booking using the Spanish site and showing interest in booking a car rental. This can trigger a pop-up box with the latest rental promotions, and of course the pop-up or promotional interaction has to be in Spanish to keep it relevant or the customer could go elsewhere, maybe feeling slightly “disengaged” if not in their preferred language and adapted to their culture or geography.

Here are the three main steps involved in the online travel booking journey with some localization tips on what to look out for:

SEARCH & RESEARCH

Many people start the search process with a review site or a search engine. In Google’s travel tracking study, the 2014 Travelers Road to Decision, 83% of respondents in the study use social networking, video or photo sites to inspire the first step in trip planning, 61% use search engines and 42% using travel review sites and apps.

This stresses the importance of a global digital marketing strategy to attract and win new travel customers. Online travel content has to be searchable for all existing and new customers. SEM, SEO, PPC and keywords have to be multilingual to attract and win new travel customers. Customer reviews can run into millions; however, for them to be readable all over the world, they need to be translated into target languages. Due to sheer volume and speed of publishing, reviews (UGC content) can be a challenge to localize and translate. Translation automation, like machine translation (MT) can overcome this. Customers are happy as long as they can just understand the review, they don’t need the quality of the content to be exceptional. MT can deal with high volumes and be posted immediately.

BOOKING

Once a purchase decision has been reached, it’s time to book and pay. There is a potential loss of revenue and customer, if an expensive digital marketing campaign user interface (UIs) for booking suddenly reverts back to another language! All booking UIs (and associate help and support documentation) INCLUDING the payment engines should be in the right language to continue the personalized journey, keeping it relevant. Any emails confirming booking must also be in the right language.

FEEDBACK

Although the booking has been made, the journey isn’t over yet. In fact, it is never over. The traveler may have booked their latest excursion; however, travel operators want to retain their business to increase the lifetime customer value. They also want to make sure the customer experience meets the needs of the consumer and they are happy with their purchase. Frequently, online travel companies will look to gain feedback, send promotions, continue to engage and personalize any future trips or experiences. If you jump onto TripAdvisor, even after being away for a while, the site still greets you with you name. This multilingual and personalized customer experience never ends. Companies have to ensure any feedback communications remain in the right target language.

One final word of advice, test all localized content across all channels and devices. Research may be done on a smartphone, but the customer may ultimately book using a laptop! We are multi-modal, multilingual and on the move!