Social media provides an intimate spin that most business strategies must include, and the world of luxury travel is no different.
Nowadays, you can share practically every aspect of your life with complete strangers.
Regardless of where you are in the world, you can have a faithful band of Followers advocating everything about you.
Through social media, you can present yourself to the world in a way historically unheard of.
In fact, you can take snippets of your life and present them to the world in real time. Additionally, you can also receive feedback on your posts virtually immediately.
For the world of luxury travel, high net worth consumers want to translate their unique experiences into socially popular mediums.
As such, they require transparency and close collaboration with travel advisers.
Thus, they’re moving away from an industry strategy built upon a demographic profile. Rather, they are now seeking personalised, curated customer care.
Luxury travel is now data driven, and customer-focused
In that vein, travel services for the wealthy are modelling their business strategies on those of other platforms that harness the power of tech.
Average consumers are increasingly aware that companies use algorithms to make user engagement on digital and online platforms more personal.
Thus, elite travel services now realise that their clientele want personalisation to be a prime focus of their experiences.
From a strategic perspective, brands need to harness this desire for close human collaboration not for the simple sake of effecting a singular service, but also for creating loyalty.
According to Matthew Upchurch, CEO of luxury travel service Virtuoso, luxury clientele are diverse, and have their own unique needs.
Therefore, their desires and standards for travel will hinge on a mixture of variables, all of which require a personal touch.
He comments on the nature of luxury travellers today:
“These motivations aren’t mutually exclusive, and consumers don’t want to be pigeonholed as a particular type of traveler.
“They self-identify based on how they view themselves. Their perceptions of themselves and their expectations from their travels vary based on who’s with them and where they’re going.”
However, the luxury industry isn’t the only one capitalising on the notion of personalisation.
This degree of customer engagement is becoming the norm throughout the practices of a myriad of firms.
In a period of polarisation between nations (Trump’s presidency, and Brexit, for example), people are seeking transparency from corporations, along with governments.
Thus, social media both facilitates and necessitates consumer demands for a personal touch.
Did you enjoy, “Luxury travel getting up close and personal in 2017”?
Read more:
Luxury brands have to follow these five trends to survive 2017