According to the World Travel and Tourism Council:
“The global Travel & Tourism sector grew at 3.9% to contribute a record $8.8 trillion and 319 million jobs to the world economy in 2018. For the eighth consecutive year, this was above the growth rate of world GDP”
It is no surprise that as an industry grows steadily, the rise of digital technology both rises and often becomes a catalyst in further grown of that industry. The relationship between digital transformation and growth of this industry is outlined succinctly in Deloitte’s 2019 Travel and Hospitality Outlook for the US market, which summarizes that “Cognitive Insight permeates the travel space”. Simply put, that means leveraging digital technology to understand the context of service and use it to avoid service disruptions, improve customer personalization and more. Some of the “cognitive insight” examples sighted in the Deloitte report are:
The importance of digital transformation is not just limited to the US (or other Western countries). According to an engaging report by KPMG, the story is no different (rather, further accelerated) in countries like India where digital transformation is fueling rapid growth in the growth if this vertical.
According to the reports sighted above as well as an ROI study by Adobe for the Travel and Hospitality market, the #1 driver is to “improve customer journeys”. Which, in layman terms means the following:
A lot of the ‘video as applicable to Travel and Hospitality Industry’ articles focus on brand new experiences that are not mainstream today. Most of the focus here is on Augmented, Virtual or Mixed reality. Virtual Reality (VR) is primarily focused on giving potential customers a view of their ‘target destination’ in the first person. In this use-case, they put in specialized VR headsets and they see themselves in target destinations. In other words, this is very similar to the VR gaming industry, just applied to a different ‘end user experience’. Augmented Reality (AR) on the other hand is becoming more mainstream and is actually offered by many vendors today. For example, Amazon today allows you to shop for items, then ‘place the item anywhere in your house’ to see how it would look using your phone camera and AR. Similarly, several fashion brands allow you to try on catalog items on yourself using AR.
While new potential revenue areas are always exciting, they always come along with a degree of skepticism on how much ROI they can directly bring in. It is a valid argument that many of these enablers help drive and retain customers, but if it’s hard to measure, it is hard to justify except for enterprises that pride themselves on being the first to define trends. So let’s talk about how Video Analytics can help improve “Customer Journeys” (which everyone seems to agree is the #1 priority):
In this article, we described how video analytics can be used to improve customer journey experiences by offering more context with little to no reliance on customer equipment (such as apps/phones/etc.). There are many other examples of how Video Analytics can improve the overall Travel and Hospitality industry. One key area that we did not discuss in more depth is the important “Safety and Security” sub-vertical, which in itself is an important area that advanced video AI algorithms can greatly improve. Let’s leave that for another day and another article.
- https://www.wttc.org/about/media-centre/press-releases/press-releases/2019/travel-tourism-continues-strong-growth-above-global-gdp/
- https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/nl/Documents/consumer-business/deloitte-cip-ths-travel-hospitality-outlook-2019.pdf
- https://assets.kpmg/content/dam/kpmg/in/pdf/2018/03/FICCI-travel-hospitality-gone-digital.pdf
- https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/industries/travel-hospitality/pdf/adobe-cx-spotlight-travel-hospitality.pdf
- https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/30/wanna-kicks-a-new-ar-app-from-wannaby-lets-you-virtually-try-on-your-next-pair-of-kicks/
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