Love to travel? Navigating travel plans can be tricky. Explore destination decisions, time management, budgeting, and more. Uncover the ease of journey planning with insights and tips, including the power of push notifications for the travel industry.
All of this planning takes time, and in our busy lives today, it has gotten difficult to find that time. Travel companies realize this and have taken to finding ways to make it easier for their customers. One of these ways that has proven to be very successful is the use of push notifications.
These push notifications help customers through the entire journey- including before booking, through the entire booking process, the time leading up to the planned trip, and even during the trip itself.
For this reason, the travel industry benefits from push notifications and the possibilities they offer in terms of customer engagement, revenue opportunities, and boosting customer satisfaction.
Push notifications have emerged as a powerful tool to engage customers directly on their devices, fostering personalized interactions and driving revenue growth.
In this comprehensive guide, we will explore the transformative role of push notifications in the traveling industry, shedding light on their numerous benefits, effective strategies, and how Netcore can aid in the growth of your travel company.
Why do travel apps need push notifications?
Real-time communication is a must-have in the travel and hospitality industries. Whether your app specializes in bookings, hospitality, transportation, flights, touring, or some other element of the travel experience, your customers not only benefit from but require timely updates about the factors that affect their travel plans.
When consumers hesitate to finalize their travel plans, you run the risk of them churning. There’s a reason the travel industry has one of the highest abandoned cart rates across verticals.
That being said, your travel or hospitality app can benefit from messaging your users with a variety of transactional and marketing messages. These messages allow you to deliver a less stressful and more seamless combined digital and physical travel experience, which is bound to keep users coming back the next time they need to make arrangements.
Let’s get into some key push notification examples in the travel space.
1. Travel Deals
As your users begin the travel planning process, they’ll start by researching your offerings based on their target criteria. If you’re a hotel booking app, for example, these parameters might include location, price range, number of guests, etcetera.
Targeting your promotional messages based on prior engagement patterns and known preferences is key here so that you avoid irritating your subscribers with irrelevant content.
With push notifications and SMS, you can advertise your hottest travel deals using cross-channel behavior to personalize your message. The status of your travel offerings, such as the availability of extra hotel rooms or bus seats, can change quickly, which makes it all the more important to distribute promotions via these visible and real-time channels.
With SMS, users are sensitive to over-messaging, so you’ll want to be selective and only advertise the most urgent and enticing promotions in this channel.
With push notifications, you don’t have to worry as much about over-messaging, so feel free to promote deals more frequently here.
2. Confirmations
After a user has booked a trip or finalized a reservation with you, you should send them a message confirming that their transaction went through. SMS is an excellent channel for booking confirmations because it’s more permanent than push notifications but still immediate.
Confirmations in this category can include bookings for flights, hotels, cars, tours, and more, and they should contain a summary of the user’s reservation and its key details.
These messages should be automated so they are received conveniently after users complete a transaction. Sending these messages via SMS is effective because this channel gives users a quick way to revisit essential information tied to their trip, even in the absence of an internet connection.
3. Itinerary Updates
Imagine a user is running late for their flight and is sprinting through the airport to find their gate. Suddenly, their phone dings as they receive a notification that their flight gate has changed. They swiftly change direction and double back towards the new gate.
In this example, receiving a push notification at exactly the right moment means the difference between a user missing and making their flight.
After a user has completed a booking or reservation with your company, you’ll want to help them track the relevant moving pieces throughout their post-purchase journey.
Flights, logistics, and accommodations can change in a heartbeat, which is why it’s crucial for users to receive these itinerary updates in real-time. These updates should convey urgency and highlight the details that have changed, including an updated date, time, and location in a simple and succinct format.
Itinerary updates can include the likes of transportation delays, cancellations, gate and terminal changes, and more.
Let’s say a user’s flight has changed due to bad weather. Send them an immediate push update from your app with the relevant information.
“Hey there Maria, your flight is delayed due to unsafe conditions. Check its real-time departure status here {link}”
Push notification is an excellent option for these alerts, as it’s the most efficient and visible way to notify users on the go. After an itinerary is published, you can set up an automated message to be triggered when plans change.
Keeping your users informed through the inevitable delays and inconveniences that arise in the travel industry helps salvage customer satisfaction.
4. Reminders
Send appropriately timed reminders via either push or SMS to make sure travelers arrive at the right place at the right time and avoid travel snafus.
Your airline can send users a push reminding them of their gate number an hour before they board.
Your hotel app can send users an SMS with a link to their check-in page for tomorrow’s reservation.
Your travel agency can send a friendly push that their museum tour requires attendees to wear masks.
Hi {first name}. We’re excited to welcome you today! Check-in for your stay at {hotel name} with the following link {link}.
Reminder notifications can help users stay on top of their plans and show up prepared. It should go without saying, but these notifications must be customized, timed, and targeted to land effectively.
5. Cart Abandonment Notifications
The travel industry as a whole faces an 81 percent cart abandonment rate, which creates a struggle for marketers in this vertical. When sending cart abandonment notifications, it’s important to place yourself in your users’ mindset. Think about the best content and optimal timing to spur re-engagement.
Hook them by helping them visualize being on their dream vacation with the help of your product or service. In the traveler’s buyer journey, there’s plenty of room for creativity and emotional marketing tactics. You can even layer in an extra incentive like a discount to get users back to your bookings page.
Push notifications are an excellent choice for abandoned cart notifications, as it gives you a way of reaching users directly and immediately.
Hopefully, these use cases spark some ideas for your travel app’s next messaging campaign! To learn more about pairing the right use case with the right communication channel, check out other use cases on features like Email, SMS, and In-App Messaging.
The Top 5 Push Notification Services Providers in 2023?
1) Netcore:
Netcore Cloud’s Customer Engagement & Experience platform is a one-stop growth platform that enables marketers, growth, and product managers to drive powerful conversations with customers across multiple mobile platforms, across mobile users, apps, and touchpoints.
Users on G2 have praised Netcore for the following points:
- Netcore Cloud is a platform that enables website and mobile app brands to achieve omnichannel growth.
- The platform uses data analysis backed by AI/ML to automate the delivery of personalized multichannel campaigns.
- These campaigns are targeted at the right user segments at the right time with real-time reporting and product analytics.
- Netcore Cloud is a no-code platform, which means it’s easy to use and adds speed and agility to the creation of amazing product experiences.
- The ultimate goal of Netcore Cloud is to engage, convert, and retain users through personalized and effective multichannel campaigns.
2) OneSignal:
OneSignal is the market-leading Omni channel customer engagement platform for building customer relationships through personalized messaging across mobile and web push notifications, in-app messaging, SMS, and email.
Users on G2 have praised OneSignal for these points:
- Cost-effective and robust push notification service available.
- Instant notification delivery without delay.
- Includes all necessary testing features.
- Able to handle huge volume at a low cost.
- Great customer support provided.
3) Iterable:
Iterable empowers growth marketers to create world-class user engagement campaigns throughout the full lifecycle of user behavior and across all channels. Marketers segment users, build workflows, connect and automate relevant touchpoints, and test strategies at scale without engineering support.
Users on G2 have praised Iterable for these points:
- User-friendly and easy to learn.
- Provides solid functionality and customization options for marketing automation needs.
- Open API infrastructure for transparency and external platform connectivity.
- Support team is prompt and responsive.
- Offers visibility into all platform activities.
4) ContactPigeon:
ContactPigeon is creating an award-winning omnichannel marketing automation platform that gives companies a solution to every retailer’s problem: How to send the right message, at the right time, with the right relevant content to each visitor. It enables one-person-shops and enterprise retailers alike to benefit from the use of a Big Data platform, in order for companies to easily create data-driven Automations and Personalized Campaigns that react to customer/visitor behaviors and catalog changes in seconds.
Users on G2 have praised Contact Pigeon for these points:
- ContactPigeon’s platform is highly regarded in the industry.
- Automations such as cart and browse abandonment have been successful and saved time.
- The platform offers a range of features including email campaigns, on-site retargeting, push notifications, and landing pages.
- Email campaigns have been particularly successful for reaching a broader audience.
- ContactPigeon’s capabilities have become a significant asset for expanding the client base and overall marketing strategy.
5) Omnisend:
One can choose Omnisend’s email & SMS marketing to increase their sales, not the workload. Full integration with ecommerce platforms, pre-built automation workflows, and intuitive, no-code editing make it easy to get up & running without diving into the gritty details – unless you want to. More than 75 e-commerce brands use Omnisend to grow their businesses on autopilot, converting their customers with quick-to-build, highly-relevant emails & texts.
Users on G2 have praised Omnisend for these points:
- The platform offers useful integrations for e-commerce websites, such as showing successful orders and setting up automation for cart abandonment.
- The email builder is user-friendly and offers drag-and-drop functionality like any other ESP.
- Omnisend can be easily integrated with WooCommerce, even with basic WordPress knowledge, and it’s easy to set up signup forms, abandoned cart recovery emails, and launch campaigns.
- The heat maps are a great feature that allows users to see who clicked on their email and where they clicked, which can help to target specific customers.
- With the help of the platform, the user was able to recover multiple abandoned carts even before launching their campaign.
Conclusion
The online travel business is a huge sphere. From hotel booking, vocational rentals, car rentals, to flight booking, there is no shortage of operatives in can consist. Each operative uses different ways to capitalize the marketing efforts.
It’s all about your creativity and innovative push alerts. You can boost your business to a great extent using push notifications on your travel websites, blogs, or booking portals. If you have been relying solely on email newsletters to engage your customers, push notifications for travel companies are some amazing marketing techs to try out.
To witness firsthand how Netcore’s advanced mobile push notification solutions can elevate your travel business, book a demo today and embark on a journey of unparalleled customer engagement and success.
