Italian tourism enterprises appear to underutilize digital tools to investigate the tastes and preferences of tourists. In practice, they have limited knowledge and interaction with their own customers. This assertion comes from the Report on the digitalization of sales channels in the tourism sector, conducted by the Digital Innovation Observatories of the Politecnico di Milano in collaboration with Minsait, a Spanish company specializing in Digital Transformation and IT consulting.
As reported by the Bitmat.it portal, the research strongly highlights the delay with which businesses in the sector are addressing this issue: only 6% of enterprises have a good understanding of visitor profiles, tastes, and preferences; a mere 2% have established a continuous and lasting relationship with them over time; and 38% lack even sufficient knowledge.
These statistics imply that the path to digitalization is still long but necessary in order to construct intelligent tourism. An intelligent tourism approach, starting with the collection and analysis of data on tourists and their travel experiences, would be capable of predicting new trends and effectively responding to the ever-evolving market demands.
“What truly makes a difference in our tourism sector is offering a personalized and unforgettable experience to our visitors,” said Alberto Bazzi, Director of Digital Business Technologies at Minsait Italia. “This means having a genuinely intelligent tourism model. We must be open to technological and digital revolution to bring our wonders closer to our visitors in the best possible way. And this means focusing innovation on three priority areas: Data, Customer Experience, and Phygital“.
The necessity of Single Customer View
As mentioned, according to the report, only a minuscule percentage of companies (2%) have managed to establish a continuous and lasting relationship with customers, while 37% can only do so through certain contact channels and/or only for specific customer categories (such as the most loyal) or activities (for example, pre-sale but not post-sale). Nearly two-thirds of enterprises interact with their customers only at the moment of actual sale or service consumption.
All this signifies a very limited knowledge of the customer, namely the tourist traveling in Italy, with repercussions on the quality of the offering, which is difficult to personalize and make more appealing to customers due to the lack of comprehensive and current profiling data. This is why it’s imperative to move toward a Single Customer View, a comprehensive perspective that includes all customer information and enables the interpretation of their behaviors regardless of the channels used (website, social media, app, e-commerce, physical store, customer care, etc.).
Omnichannel has not yet been reached
Currently, only 27% of tourism enterprises have implemented the Single Customer View, while 43% have begun to construct it with only some of the available data. Among the rest, approximately a third have not yet integrated any type of data but have stated that they are working on it. Businesses contact customers through all available channels: social networks, proprietary websites, email, and contact centers. However, this does not ensure effective integration of collected data.
The sector, in fact, has not yet achieved true omnichannel capability: only 16% of the analyzed companies in the sector claim to be able to track their customers across all channels, while 60% can only do so on certain channels(such as digital ones). On the other hand, 24% of enterprises are unable to recognize customers when they interact with company channels. Finally, 51% of tourism enterprises have begun to collect information in a single database or in multiple interconnected databases. However, the crux of the matter is this: if contact channels do not communicate with each other, information remains fragmented, outdated, and doesn’t allow understanding the value of the customer or offering them what they seek.
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