April 17, 2023

Evolving With the Latest Travel Trends

Sarah Moore

Travelers are ready and more willing to explore new destinations than ever before. With tourism skyrocketing post-COVID, it’s more important than ever to reach the travel consumer and bring value to their bookings. Being a leader in the global travel industry space means evolving your goals and business to meet the traveler where they are today.

Growing, transforming, and strengthening our core

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Beautiful Rust - Noel F.
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Sunrise Moment in Bagan - Justyna S.

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Nostalgia gives us perspective and, maybe, objectivity- Valentina O.

Love lights life- Diana F.

According to Forbes Advisor, it’s all about savvy travel: knowing how and where to save and splurge. Customers are looking for more ways to get value out of their travel, which leaves Rocket Travel by Agoda and our partners in an excellent position. Our mission is to bring that value to our partners and their customers. How do we do that? By being an expert in the travel loyalty space. With more than 60 loyalty partners worldwide and through our own consumer-facing platform, Rocketmiles.com, we have extensive experience in offering the best travel rewards to customers.

Since our inception in 2013, we have stood by our value proposition of making travel more rewarding, and have continued to grow and evolve our online travel booking platforms. Being a leader in the global travel industry means you need to have an expert team managing enhanced back-end technology, marketing capabilities and overall strategy. Through the years, our teams have run thousands of experiments testing our user interface and marketing initiatives. We take our findings from these experiments, analyze them and put them into practice, powering some of the largest consumer travel brands in the world.

We're different and we're good at it

Every part of the Rocket Travel by Agoda team is partner-centric, serving as an extension of our partners’ own in-house teams. We collaborate constantly and effectively, offering data-driven solutions to meet the needs of their customers and their business objectives. We are transparent and make sure our partner platforms are a success from day one.

Today, so many consumer brands are creating their own loyalty programs, over-saturating the market. Brands need to be innovative and resilient to stay ahead of their competitors. We are a mutually-invested partner that ensures our partner’s loyalty programs cut through the noise by providing the best value and drive engagement with their customers.

In-depth consumer journeys drive engagement throughout every phase of the customer lifecycle. A robust suite of transactional emails ensure customers have all the information needed at their fingertips from booking, to check-in, and post-trip. Dynamic cross-sell strategies allow us to drive high attach rates with other travel products offered by our partners, generating incremental bookings and boosting the value of each trip, and abandoned search and welcome series ensures customers understand the value of our partners’ travel platforms and stay loyal to our partners’ brands.

Personalized content leveraged throughout our emails, delivering a unique experience for the consumer. Our personalized email communications ensure each customer has all the information they need throughout their travels, easy ways to contact our customer loyalty team for assistance, and suggest travel destinations based on their personal travel preferences. This adds a level of convenience to the consumer experience and drives engagement with our partners’ brands.

Utilizing AI is quickly becoming a cornerstone of email marketing. Using artificial intelligence allows our marketing teams to quickly drive innovation through A/B experimentation. In testing, we have found it to be very effective at driving results and are developing new ways to leverage this emerging technology as email marketing services continue to expand.

Segmenting audiences based on previous engagement data to deliver new messages to the customer and drive continued engagement with our white label platforms.

Robust reporting enables us to continually optimize the performance of our campaigns, and keep partners informed of success and areas of opportunity at every phase of a partnership.

What's to come for travel and Rocket Travel by Agoda in 2023

Economists are predicting that global travel will rise by 30% in 2023. We are seeing that Americans are more interested in international travel by 31% this year and overseas hotel bookings by mainland Chinese travelers have quadrupled in 2023 already. Additionally, savvy travelers are prioritizing the use of loyalty programs by 60%, enabling us to take advantage of these opportunities customer engagement and value for our partners.

In 2023 and beyond, Rocket Travel by Agoda will continue to be nimble and prioritize our value proposition, being the most rewarding place for our partners' customers to book travel. Growing our teams, experience, strategy and technology will empower us to maximize opportunities within the travel market, and deliver results for all our partners.

About the author

Sarah Moore is the head officer for Rocket Travel by Agoda, previously serving as Senior Vice President, Commercial for the team. Before joining Rocket Travel by Agoda, Moore served in leadership roles with both Expedia and Orbitz Worldwide. She’s also a founding member of Chief, a private network built to drive more women into positions of power and keep them there.