Shaping the Future of Luxury Travel | Future Traveller Tribes 2030 21
Overall, Special Occasion travellers are the most difficult to pin down. How can suppliers meet the needs of new, infrequent customers, who may not necessarily know what they want in the first place?
You need to be able to listen and read between the lines or their body language and their behaviour throughout their trip and to communicate that extremely fast within your team,” says Joachim Hartl from Conrad Algarve. “You need a very good Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, and it needs to be constantly fed. We have engineers and maids going into the hotel rooms who have received special training so that they can scan the room and make observations. If they see, for example, that somebody has running shoes, we’ll leave them extra bottles of water. They then feed back to the CRM via our front office team.”
“So, you pick up on habits and can proactively forecast what the guest might want, without them expressing it. If you manage to do this two or three times throughout their stay, they will leave saying ‘this is exceptional’.”
Perhaps the most significant concern for servicing Special Occasion travellers is the greater potential for disruption to their end-to-end luxury travel experience. Unlike Always Luxury travellers, they may chop and change part of their trip to suit their budget. For example, they may fly in economy class to spend three nights in a luxury resort in Koh Samui to celebrate their wedding anniversary, meaning their outbound journey is subject to the same risks of lost luggage and lengthy airport security queues as non-luxury travellers.
This tribe could benefit from greater cross-sector collaboration within the travel industry – currently, little is being done to recover the damage done to Special Occasion travellers when disruption occurs, as industry sectors operate independently.
The new era of luxury travel will encourage suppliers to understand their part in each traveller’s overall journey cycle so that they can adapt to incidents that may affect the traveller’s mood and needs. This will require suppliers communicating with each other along the journey cycle so that travellers’ real-time needs can be met – and so that their faith in their suppliers is restored if damage has been done.
My dream holiday would be...
“Travelling around the US in a comfortable limousine, staying in small, totally exclusive accommodation, tucked away in safe, quiet places.”
#SpecialOccasion
Special Occasion travellers will be lower down the Hierarchy of Luxury Travel Needs. This means there is more potential to “upgrade” their luxury travel experience by satisfying a new level of luxury needs, be it access to an authentic or indulgent experience they would not normally be accustomed to, or a higher tier of cabin class or hotel room. In this way, travel providers have more options for providing a luxury experience to Special Occasion travellers.
#SpecialOccasion traveller: “Once a year, we do a special gathering with family and friends. This year we booked a private catamaran with a skipper to explore the Grenadines. In order to book a larger and more
comfortable boat, we saved money elsewhere. Swimming with turtles and rays in the beautiful Caribbean, with the people I choose – that’s my style of luxury.”
Patricia Simillon, Senior Manager, Airline IT Strategic Marketing, Amadeus
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