Building a brand if the price is wrong

I was at the Travel Technology Show in Earl’s Court earlier this month, and there was some fascinating sessions and products on offer, as you’d expect from such an innovative industry.

However, one thing that particularly interested me was how price sensitive customers are for short haul holidays. One speaker went so far as to claim that there was ‘no such thing as brand’ in the short haul holiday market. Now, I understand that when buying flights, price is probably the single biggest factor – but buying holidays? Surely not.

But it does raise a key question – how do you go about building a brand where price is so important? Listening to the speakers, I was reminded of something Marty keeps telling me – when the customer is king, your brand is the customer experience.

In complete contrast, a large proportion of travel sites are little more than glorified booking engines. While this is no mean achievement, it is something of a self-fulfilling prophesy – if all a customer can do is obtain prices, then price is the only thing people will use to make decisions.

Travel is a topic that everyone loves to talk about, so a combination of user reviews and travel agents blogs would provide credibility, insight and real value. Despite recent exposes revealing that companies are posting their own reviews on these sites, they are still a key factor in customers making decisions.

One essential element of a good travel operator sites is the integration of telephone and website booking. If my experience is anything to go by, then users are happy to buy short haul flights without speaking to anyone, but anything more significant requires human interaction.

Last year Skype put out a call for a major travel company to trial its offering on a site. This sort of innovation, things that put the customer in control of the interaction, is surely the type of innovation that will help improve the user experience in the long run, help convince them to make the final purchase decision, and build your brand.