Expedia officials always want to provide an exemplary customer experience. To fulfill that customer experience, first, comes from driving customer engagement through compelling content.
“Traveling can be difficult, and the planning is big part of why is it so complex,” Expedia CMO David Doctorow explained to Loyalty360. “Our main goal is to provide customers with compelling content that adds value no matter what stage of planning or traveling he/she is in. We want people to think of Expedia when they are in need of travel advice, want to learn more about a destination or are actively taking a trip so we invest heavily in building and offering a robust set of digital tools, resources and content designed to help people find what they want based on their personal needs and interests at the time.”
For example, Doctorow noted Expedia’s popular Viewfinder blog, which tells authentic travel stories and provides helpful tips from the perspective of real like-minded travelers.
“And our Expedia mobile apps give customers a personalized real-time itinerary that can automatically alert them of important changes during a trip,” Doctorow said. “Once we have given people that extra value and increased confidence, they tend to come back to shop and book with Expedia, which benefits our business across the board. Yes, we do have KPIs that are important for us to meet, but at the core Expedia’s focus is to offer high quality content and best-in-class travel resources that are relevant, accessible, and engaging for our customers that ultimately make travel easier and more enjoyable.”
Doctorow said that true customer loyalty doesn’t emanate from how fast a company innovates, but how it builds a product that allows customers to easily and confidently make a purchase.
“By creating effective products that entice customers, engagement with the brand will follow,” he said. “Listen and adapt to customers’ needs and wants to ensure a product or service that is worthwhile and one that they will want to interact with constantly. By developing a trustworthy product, the brand will become trustworthy as well with any new offerings. What we’ve found is that travelers (and customers) today really want is to see how the market is changing in real time and for Expedia to continuously push new search results, inspiration, options, and helpful services directly to them in their moment of need. We’re using intelligence and science to turn big data into smart data and put the power of now directly into our customers’ hands. Many companies’ algorithms sacrifice intelligence for simplicity and ease of use for the customer. We’re not only surfacing the right info, but also building and using algorithms to make the travel market more transparent to people by finding smart ways to aggregate and trend our vast amount of data, so that Expedia’s offerings will ultimately be able to benefit customers in in real time. We encourage this same type of transparency and intelligence among all marketers.”