I have two teenage children and they will never experience the kind of travel that I did at their age. At 19, I traveled alone from New York City to Rome—converting money to traveler’s checks, reading a newspaper ad and calling a phone number to book a flight, finding a storefront in a foreign city that had long-distance phone capabilities and then hearing a faint voice on the other end that seemed, well, the thousands of miles away that it was, just to share the fact that I had arrived and was still, in fact, alive.
It was an amazing, formative adventure for me, and it was totally and completely analog.
On my most recent travel adventure, one I undertook with my kids, we researched Turkey online, booked flights and hotels in Istanbul easily via a website, got immediate updates on our flight via an app and instantaneously shared our adventures on Facebook and Snapchat.
While this type of travel experience is entirely new, “experiential travel” is not new. In fact, I’d say all travel has always been experiential, but that phrase seems to capture the rising interest in being immersed in a new culture, language, geography or activity.
What has changed, however, is how demanding this intrepid traveler can be, especially in the face of the power of the internet, apps and social media. It’s not enough to merely offer the mechanics of the trip—researching, booking and fulfillment. No, to truly delight this type of traveler, each step of the trip has to be, well, experiential.
Just as these travelers want to engage in off-the-beaten-track cultures and activities, so too do we need to engage them before, during and after the trip in the medium of their choice, be that in person, on the phone, via desktop or mobile app, in a way that appears seamless.
Not only are we demanding more customized trip experiences, we’re also demanding a more connected experience, with more ways to stay engaged with friends back home and with the providers of our journey. Where we once had to wait to share experiences via a Kodachrome slide projector and a dark room, now we check in via Facebook when we arrive, just to make sure the world knows we’re having a better time than they are.
Customer service has had to adapt as well. Not long ago, we had to wait until we arrived back home to call a customer-service number to complain about being overcharged at the hotel. Now, we can use social media while rushing to the airport and expect a quick resolution before we embark on the plane for our return flight.
By 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator, according to Walker Information, a national consulting firm focused on customer intelligence. This is thanks largely to the explosion of digital technologies and the acceleration of innovation.
So while I’m of such an age that I can remember driving from New York to Florida and looking for the “Vacancy” sign on motels as you slowed down from town to town, the connected traveler expects a far more cohesive journey that allows them to stay connected and enjoy seamless digital interactions with their travel provider.
