However, the tourism industry is resilient. It’s confronted world-changing issues before and undoubtedly will do so again. The key to surviving crises lies in the industry’s ability to be decisive and adaptable to change. As travel resumes in the next 12-18 months, AI-driven analytics will be integral in helping the travel industry flourish once again.

Increased appetite to ‘infuse analytics everywhere’

In Sisense’s recent ANZ State of BI and Analytics survey, 78% of organisations forecasted to either maintain or increase their spend on BI and data analytics initiatives in the near future. This includes increased spend on software, tools, time, and team members.

At the global level, Sisense’s State of BI & Analytics survey revealed almost 90% of data professionals across industries believe analytics provides much-needed business insights to stay competitive.

Travel respondents in this survey, specifically enterprise organisations such as airlines, are playing catchup as they start to look beyond conventional thinking by tapping analytics and delivering action-oriented real-time insights.

How data analytics can reshape travel

There are many different datasets that go into a well-run hospitality entity. Using an analytics solution can integrate everything from property management systems to sales databases, from reservation systems to foodservice data and employee management. These cross-functional integrations allow a business to increase sales and reduce operating costs by pinpointing problem areas and streamlines all data into one source.

Within the airline industry, infusing AI-driven insights is useful for integrating different datasets, including weather reports to predict flight setbacks and cancellations. By infusing BI and AI-driven insights, hotels can help understand the customer journey by visualising customer behaviour holistically.  This can help hotels gain deeper insights into what works, and what doesn’t, and establish expectations from specific customers.

When infusing AI-driven analytics, airlines and the travel industry will be positively impacted by the following:

Contactless travel and biometrics

With health, safety and social distancing top of mind, the new norm is to decrease human touch and become mobile-friendly. Airports and airlines have embraced the concept of smart self-service, from online check-in and print-at-home bag tags to automated baggage drop.

Some airlines have made significant strides in automating the passenger journey, moving away from ‘low-touch' to COVID-safe contactless.

When touchless technology is combined with biometrics, the experience becomes frictionless. Pre-departure verification with facial recognition has been seeing broader use. 

One benefit is seamless boarding and border checkpoint processing, but there is a myriad of other user cases. In time, these processes could incorporate personal health data into a so-called “immunity passport.” Other uses include integrated contact tracing and strengthening loyalty program security.

“A critical element will be for governments to harmonise the approach of checking the validity of health status and sharing this information effectively,” says Jeremy Springer, SITA’s VP of Border Management.

Personalisation and a ‘Parallel Reality'

Airlines have vast datasets on customer travel history, preferences, loyalty program activity, and purchase behaviour. Yet these have barely been used to their full potential. Leveraging data for targeted marketing is more critical than ever right now.

One exciting upcoming development is Delta Air Lines’ “Parallel Reality.” Inside this larger-than-life-sounding program, once a passenger scans their boarding pass, personalised messages are relayed on large public TV screens throughout the airport. These messages offer wayfinding information such as directions to the gate or where to find the business lounge. Multiple passengers can view the same screen but will receive unique content tailored just for them via smartphone tracking.

Air Canada and improving safety at scale

Using the Sisense Fusion Platform, Air Canada was able to build powerful proofs of concept to improve safety across the airlines. By pushing actionable data to their stakeholders (frontline employees and executives), Air Canada enabled these stakeholders to focus and immediately act upon important insights about their day-to-day activities, especially activities relating to safety. This helped add insights about safety across the organisation and improve safety measures for the end-user.

The Canadian airline developed these innovative improvements as a result of its ability to deliver crucial and personalised data and insights to its employees and frontline workers.

Testing led to innovations in internal communications for Air Canada like the airline being able to send real-time notifications to employees’ smartwatches, and by using the Amazon Echo as a communication tool, staff could ask questions in their own words. Additionally, Air Canada transformed traditional dashboards into immersive 3D environments that used mixed reality to display data in different ways.

Flight Centre and sales performance tracking

Flight Centre Travel Group's (FCTG) purpose is to open up the world for those who want to see it. FCTG faced challenges in pulling data together for a simple and user-friendly report to track daily sales and performance across the company.

It would take up to three hours each morning to create this report, which the sales team used to influence and plan their daily targets. There was a need to improve efficiency and minimise any lost opportunities. Thus, it was necessary to develop an end-to-end solution that would replace manual reporting and allow 80 business users to receive daily reports at the click of a button.

Although FCTG originally thought Sisense would solve one problem, they quickly realised that it could answer a vast number of other problems that they were yet to fully realise. Business users were no longer happy with daily reports. Decision-makers wanted real-time data and reports.

FCTG increased insight into their key business drivers by looking directly on a day-to-day basis at individual clients and consultant performance. This allowed FCTG to analyse consultant conversion rate and productivity, which allowed them to focus on developing their consultants and make the most out of their time and efforts.

Preparing for the road to recovery

 The challenges of the pandemic, including rapidly shifting economic and employment conditions, means airlines have to quickly adapt to meet sharp shifts in consumer behaviour. Timing is vital, and airlines that can tap dynamic datasets and optimise schedules in real-time will be ultimately more agile and empowered in their next phase of the recovery process.

About Sisense

Sisense goes beyond traditional business intelligence by providing organizations with the ability to infuse analytics everywhere, embedded in both customer and employee applications and workflows. Sisense customers are breaking through the barriers of analytics adoption by going beyond the dashboard with Sisense Fusion - the highly customizable, AI-driven analytics cloud platform, that infuses intelligence at the right place and the right time, every time. More than 2,000 global companies such as GitLab, UiPath, Tinder, Nasdaq, GE, Rolls Royce and Philips Healthcare rely on Sisense to innovate, disrupt markets and drive meaningful change in the world. Ranked as the No. 1 Business Intelligence company in terms of customer success, Sisense has also been named one of the Forbes’ Cloud 100, The World’s Best Cloud Companies, five years in a row. Visit us at www.sisense.com and connect with us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.