Your passport to better digital experience: 4 DX data opportunities for the travel and hospitality industry

In a 2022 survey conducted by Forrester on behalf of Fullstory, seven out of ten travel and hospitality industry business leaders said that improving the overall digital experience is important or critical to their business in the next 12 months.

Reinforcing this point, Fullstory user Kevin McAuliffe, VP of Digital Transformation and Delivery at Travel + Leisure Co., had this explanation for the importance of the digital experience:

"We need to understand how our customers use what we are building and how they actually consume a digital experience. Digital analytics allow us to understand perception and behavior together so we have our eyes wide open about the customer journey and can make the best decisions about where to spend effort and capital."

In this article, we’ll explore the top digital experience data opportunities identified by travel/hospitality survey respondents, and how the numbers compare to responses from other industries (specifically: tech and SaaS, consumer goods/manufacturing, ecommerce/retail, and finance/insurance).

Opportunity 1: Inform new site features

In the survey, nearly seven out of ten of travel/hospitality business leaders identified informing new features as an area their organization is looking to solve with a digital experience and analytics tool.

Knowing which website or app features to invest in is notoriously complicated. A dev team might invest months building or improving a feature, only to see it struggle for adoption when released. Fullstory's Digital Experience Intelligence (DXI) platform empowers teams to make product decisions based on actual user interaction data—so you can build exactly what users or customers need.

For instance, Flight Centre—one of the world’s largest business and group travel management companies—used Funnels in Fullstory to discover that only 6% of their consultants were using a “share” feature to send important travel documents to clients. Find out how a few simple changes sparked impressive results in the Flight Centre case study.

Opportunity 2: Track site performance

The second area of opportunity highlighted in the survey was tracking site performance, identified by 65% of travel/hospitality respondents as something their organization looks to solve with digital experience analytics.

Google’s recommended page load speed is five seconds or less—a load speed that, according to Unbounce, only one in five websites actually achieves. And after Google’s 2021 Page Experience update, page performance can even ding your site’s Google ranking.

While Fullstory won’t currently measure or assign a “Page Experience Score” for your site, there are several key Fullstory Page Speed Metrics metrics that run parallel to the new signal including: First Contentful Paint (FCP), DOMContentLoaded (DCL), and Page Load. By combining each of these metrics into a Dashboard, Fullstory users can have an at-a-glance view of site performance right alongside the rest of their DX data.

Opportunity 3: Understand bugs and errors

Of the travel/hospitality business leaders surveyed, nearly six out of ten said that understanding bugs and/or errors as an area of opportunity in using a digital experience and analytics tool.

For many companies, responding to bugs and errors in their site or app is a reactive process, investigating issues as they’re reported by customers. With Digital Experience Intelligence, though, teams can take a proactive approach to bug resolution, and solve site issues before they impact customers.

For instance, before implementing DXI, customer-facing teams at Travel + Leisure Co. responded to issues as they were reported—essentially one at a time. With Fullstory, when a problem is identified internally, the team is able to view the issue with Session Replay, identify the root cause, and fix it before it becomes a widespread issue.

Over time, this has enabled their teams to provide proactive customer support and solve problems before customers experience and report them.

Opportunity 4: Improve conversion rates

Finally, just over half of travel/hospitality respondents said that improving conversion rates is an area their organization is solving with a digital experience and analytics tool.

No matter the industry or business, conversion rates—whatever the definition of "conversion" might be—are a critical metric. And it’s been shown time and again that customers are more likely to abandon their purchase or booking if they encounter a frustrating digital experience.

Moreover, according to a Fullstory consumer survey, over half of shoppers won’t return to a retailer that provides a frustrating digital experience.

For travel and hospitality organizations, identifying those frustrating experiences and friction points is one of the first steps to increasing conversion rates. Another step in the right direction can be to double down on what’s already working well.

For example, Travel + Leisure Co.’s site offers a “Wishlist” feature, which lets users save their favorite destinations for easy navigation. With Fullstory, they found that customers who interacted with the Wishlist were almost 9% more likely to create a booking than those who didn’t engage with it.

Knowing exactly how valuable this feature is enables Travel + Leisure Co. to continue using Fullstory insights to create data-driven iterations, and to have a better understanding of how and where to best incorporate the Wishlist into the customer experience.