How can you improve leisure travel customer segmentation with journey mapping?

1 What is customer segmentation?

Customer segmentation is a marketing strategy that enables you to identify and target different types of customers based on their needs, preferences, behaviors, and values. This can help increase marketing efficiency, customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention. When it comes to leisure travel, some common criteria for customer segmentation are demographics such as age, gender, income, education, family size; psychographics like lifestyle, personality, values and interests; geographics including location, climate and culture; and behavior like travel frequency, duration, budget and purpose. Additionally, the booking channel can also be taken into account.

2 What is journey mapping?

Journey mapping is a tool that helps you visualize and understand the customer experience from their perspective. This can help you identify the pain points, emotions, expectations, and opportunities that a customer encounters along their travel journey. For leisure travel, a typical customer journey consists of five stages: dreaming, where they are inspired by travel ideas and destinations; planning, where they research and compare travel options and prices; booking, where they make a reservation and pay for their trip; experiencing, where they enjoy their trip and interact with your brand; and sharing, where they review and recommend their trip and your brand.

3 How to segment customers based on their journey?

To segment customers based on their journey, you need to collect and analyze data from various sources, such as surveys, feedback, reviews, social media, website analytics, booking systems, etc. From this data, you can create customer personas, which are fictional representations of your ideal customers to help understand their goals, motivations, challenges, and preferences at each stage of their journey. For example, you could create personas such as an adventure seeker (young and active customers who like to explore new places and activities), a family traveler (middle-aged customers who travel with their spouse and kids looking for family-friendly destinations and services), a luxury lover (wealthy and sophisticated customers who seek high-end and exclusive travel experiences), or a budget traveler (cost-conscious and flexible customers who search for the best deals and discounts).

4 How to tailor your offer to each segment?

To tailor your offer to each segment, you need to align your value proposition, marketing message, and service delivery with the needs and expectations of your customers at each stage of their journey. For example, during the dreaming stage, you can inspire customers with engaging and relevant content such as blogs, videos, images, stories, etc. that showcase your destination and brand. When it comes to planning, provide useful and trustworthy information such as guides, tips, reviews, testimonials, etc. to help them make informed decisions. During the booking stage, offer convenient and secure booking options such as online, phone, chat, etc. that suit their preferences and budget. Then delight your customers with personalized and memorable experiences such as welcome gifts, upgrades, local recommendations, etc. that exceed their expectations. Finally encourage them to share their feedback and referrals such as ratings, reviews, social media posts etc. that boost your reputation and loyalty.

5 What are the benefits of segmenting customers based on their journey?

Segmenting customers based on their journey can help you improve your leisure travel business in several ways. This includes increasing your conversion rate by offering the right product or service to the right customer at the right time and place. Enhancing customer satisfaction is also possible by meeting or exceeding the customer's needs and expectations at each stage of their journey. Additionally, building customer loyalty and gaining a competitive edge can be achieved by differentiating your brand and value proposition from competitors, as well as creating a unique customer experience. This will result in lasting and positive relationships with customers, along with rewarding repeat purchases and referrals.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?