Complex Impersonal Systems Frustrate Travelers
The problem with booking engines is that they are old legacy system steeped in archaic technology built long ago. This blog “Booking Engines doomed by personality matching”, shows how artificial intelligence and new psychologically based filtering are making travel & hotel search and booking more personal. It is not, however, an easy fix: The big problem is that legacy hotel and travel booking systems are very complex. One cannot easily fix thousands of page of code that were essentially built to do the wrong thing. Also understanding emotions and personality is an entirely different skill set that requires considerable knowledge and expertise in psychology, motivation and behaviour.
Brands Get Personal
That is why brands such as Marriott & Accord are outsourcing the latest travel matching to psychologists and personality branding professionals. What we have now is a host of new technology providers setting up shop to provide front ends to existing booking systems.
Learning From Instagram
The old way is to treat hotel rooms and activities as products when the travelers are seeking experiences. But that is not the only fly in the ointment. The old technology cannot easily integrate the fast multi dimensional filtering being implemented today on dynamic and nimble platforms. They are also not able to understand and render graphics like an Instagram, which is what travelers want today. That is a perfect example of how technology has changed and how the gap between old ways and news ways has widened.
Instagram shot up out of nowhere it seems, but it actually came about as a result of technology capacity and platform changes that could now be configured to fill a need. Over 600 million people use Instagram, generating 4.2 billion likes daily while sharing sharing about 95 million photos. See National Geographic on the rise of Instagram.
Source – National Geographics
Instagram users are more engaged compared to the other social networks, including as Facebook and Twitter. It has a 2.3% engagement rate per follower compared to Facebook at 0.2% per follower and Twitter 0.03%. They stay longer and do more! We have heard this echoed by PersonaHolidays with their massive improvement in visitor engagement when intuitive and ultra fast visual filtering was added. The new approach provided a Visual Online Review and more personalized recommendation. It is highly favoured by travelers and more evidence of “Booking Engines Doomed by Personality Matching”.
Nuclear Search Algorithms Personalize Vacations
Travelers want choice but do not want to wade through pages of non relative content and that is changing now with the new Nuclear search systems. The latest hotel search technology takes advantage of algorithms and techniques that are used in chemical and nuclear science. Matching personality is similar to sorting and solving complex chemical relationships and combination. The parts are dynamic, evolving and exponential! Advanced technology is need to filter, order and pair vast amounts of data and endless combination intelligently & instantly.
IBMs Watson is another complementary AI technology that understands tone and emotion in communication and replies with appropriate response. Its tone analyzer can analyze emotions and tones in what people write online, like tweets or reviews. It predicts whether people are happy, sad, confident and finds emotional tones that help determine what stage in the booking process a traveller is in, like if they are just talking about a hotel or actually hopping for one.
Possibilities have Shifted
The point is that technology has shifted what is possible. Lean and adaptive entrepreneurial startups are the first to see the opportunity and build the solutions using modern techniques and platform. The dynamics of the new environment put the old guard at a huge disadvantage. Indeed the new booking engines may well be Instagram and a host of new visual bookings with Psychological Profiling & Matching technology that truly inspire, engage and fascinate travelers.
See Personality Matching Technology the new visual platforms and hotel personality matching used by PersonaHolidays http://Matchmaker.travel
