Social Listening for the Travel and Hospitality Industry

The travel and hospitality industry is on rapid growth, and as of 2023 around which there are 187,000 hotels worldwide. As this number keeps growing, there becomes a need for this sector to up their game as competition keeps increasing and the need for staying at the top becomes the priority of every business in this sector. While social media has helped this industry in showcasing their best offerings, running of ad campaigns and driving growth with the help of influencers, it’s a need for these businesses to monitor and listen to what their customers have to say. Let’s get started by knowing why there is a need of Social Listening for the travel and hospitality industry.

Why does social listening matter to the Travel and Hospitality industry?

Social listening helps businesses to gather real-time insights into customer preferences, opinions, and behaviours. By monitoring conversations on social media platforms, travel and hospitality companies can understand what their customers are talking about, what they like or dislike, and what are the upcoming trends.

Social media platforms serve as public forums where customers visiting hotels and getting their travel arrangements made from travel companies like MakeMyTrip openly share their experiences, both positive and negative. By monitoring channels like instagram, twitter (now X), GMB, Quora and other hotel review sites, businesses can quickly identify and address any issues or complaints, thereby protecting their brand reputation.

By monitoring competitor activities and customer sentiments towards them, businesses can identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in the market. This insight can inform strategic decision-making and help companies differentiate themselves in a crowded marketplace.

Social listening helps companies understand which marketing campaigns resonate with their target audience and which ones fall flat. By analysing these conversations, businesses can gauge the effectiveness of their marketing efforts in real-time and make adjustments as needed to optimise campaign performance and maximise their return on investment.

Monitoring also includes sentiment analysis which allows businesses to understand the public sentiment (positive, negative, or neutral). In the Travel and Hospitality industry, sentiment analysis helps companies understand how customers feel about their experiences, destinations, accommodations, and services and show this data in the form of pie charts, word cloud, etc.

Risks of Ignoring Social Listening for Travel and Hospitality Industry

Businesses that fail to adapt to the concept of social listening may face a range of challenges and missed opportunities
Without social listening, businesses may overlook some valuable customer feedback available through social media and other online platforms, missing out on insights into customer satisfaction, product issues, and areas for improvement.
Failing to monitor online conversations means businesses won’t be as attuned to changing market trends, customer preferences, and emerging needs compared to competitors who leverage these insights.
Real-time monitoring allows for quick responses to market changes, whereas the absence of not monitoring can lead to delayed reactions, making it harder to capitalise on new opportunities or mitigate threats.
Without having these tools to detect these early, businesses might not respond swiftly enough to prevent damage to their brand reputation.
Today’s consumers expect brands to listen and respond to their needs and opinions. Businesses that fail to engage in this dialogue may see a decline in customer loyalty and retention as customers gravitate towards more responsive brands.

How AI and machine learning are shaping the future of social listening?

AI advancements have led to more sophisticated sentiment analysis tools that can understand context, sarcasm, and nuanced emotions. This enables businesses to gain a deeper understanding of customer sentiment.
AI models are continually learning and adapting to new languages, dialects, and internet slang, making social listening efforts more globally inclusive and accurate.
By analysing past and current social media behaviour, AI can predict future customer actions, such as purchase intentions or potential churn. This predictive power enables businesses to be proactive rather than reactive.
AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants can engage with customers in real-time on social media platforms, providing instant support and gathering valuable feedback.
AI can track and analyse the customer journey across social platforms, providing insights into pain points and opportunities to enhance the customer experience.

How to implement social listening in the travel and hospitality Industry?

While social listening is not just simply measuring basic metrics available on the social platform there is a need for this industry to have a unified platform and monitor metrics that are important and gives a clear picture of the businesses social presence.

Metrics such as as ,Mentions Trend with Engagement, Channel Wise Distribution, Word Cloud, Influencer category, Category Wise Distribution, Location wise distribution, Media Type With Total Engagement, etc are all important metrics on listening overview.

With the help of different dashboards like competition benchmarking, PR benchmarking, Content performance dashboard, agent activity dashboard, etc makes it better for this industry to look into different areas of social listening.

To have a better understanding of social listening it is important to have a unified tool that helps this industry in getting to know their social presence better.

Locobuzz is one such platform with endless capabilities for better customer experience using the power of AI and delivering consistent seamless experience across channels!

Discover how Locobuzz transforms the travel and hospitality industry with the power of Social Listening

Responding to the voice of the customer

While listening to your customers is just one part of improving your customer experience landscape, the other phase is responding to them effectively. Not just simply responding to their concerns but also allowing them to become your brand advocates someday sooner.

Responding to customer queries, appreciating them for their feedback, helping them with their transaction problems, etc are some of the elements that make your brand grow.

With the coming of AI and machine learning, brand agents can reduce their TAT’s by responding to customers similar to what Locobuzz ResponseGenie does with the help of your knowledge base and GPT to address the needs of customers.

Final Thoughts

While we have covered the importance of looking into a social listening tool and its importance to adapt to it and make it a priority to have it. We have looked into the downsides of not having these tools and by delaying its only benefiting your competitors to grow and dominate the industry. Neglecting social listening in the travel and hospitality sector can lead to missed opportunities for engagement and growth.

It might result in overlooking critical feedback that could have prevented a PR crisis or failing to identify emerging travel trends that could inform new service offerings. As we move forward, the brands that will lead the industry are those that not only listen and respond to their customers but even actively engage with and learn from them.