“Intuition is thinking that you know without knowing why you do.” Decisions made solely on Intuition without data backed evidence are bound to fail. Intuition without data is a fallacy. Yes, Data is the new Oil!
Post Covid-19, travel as an Industry is on its rise again. People are revenge travelling. After seeing a significant dip in the global travel spending from 2019 to 2020, the recovery is beyond expectation for everyone.
To add to it, cheap flights, affordable hotel prices, and lots of travel apps that help travellers plan and navigate their trip enabled people to travel more. There are many more Expedias and Airbnbs getting build across the globe.
Where Data lies?
Travel industry collects huge amounts of data about its customers. This data comes from a variety of sources, both internal and external. It can be structured, as with the fields and records in a database, or unstructured free-form data. In the travel industry, big data can include information about:
• Demographics
• General Preferences
• Destinations
• Meals
• Transportation preferences
• Booking activity and frequency
• Paying Capacity
With access to affordable Data warehouses and Data lakes, collection and storage of Data has gone quite easy. With all this terabytes of Data getting stored, it becomes critically essential to analyse this data through Data Models. Hence, big data becomes a critical tool for airlines, hotels, reservation and booking websites and many others that are striving to improve their services and customer experience every day.
Debunking AI & ML
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a vast area of computer science that studies how to teach computers to think and act like a human. To achieve Artificial Intelligence, Machine learning may (or may not ) get used. Machine Learning is more about building models (supervised or unsupervised) that predict the final output with high accuracy, i.e. reducing false positive and negative. But this is easier said than done. The quality of Output will largely depend on data quality, attributes used for calculation and algorithm.
Given the limitless amount of data available today, we have barely scratched the surface of big data tech. Big Data has so much potential that, if used wisely, its impact on the travel industry could be as big as the internet’s.
Now let’s understand few ways in which Big Data can play an unprecedented role in bringing more efficiency in the existing Travel Businesses
– Defining Product and Business Strategy
– Customer Personalization
– Building Recommendation Engines
– Enhancing Pricing Strategy
Conclusion
Data science is about to change the face of the travel industry. It is assisting Travel Businesses to provide a unique experience with a personalised touch, thereby improving their overall acceptance rating. In recent years data science has become one of the most promising technologies bringing changes to various industries. It has shifted the way we travel and our attitude toward travel arrangements. With the heights of innovations continuously happening in Data stream, there is a huge scope for businesses to invest more on the core of their Data Science and give a more personalized and cherishing experience to their Customers.
Written By Ahmad Danish, Group Product Manager of TravClan. Danish is a highly acclaimed Product Professional who has previously launched and scaled multiple Global Products for Companies like Practo and Tracxn. He is known for his Product acumen and data driven insights.