Innovative Online Travel Agency (OTA) is injecting social commerce strategy to attract loyal customers

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The travel and hospitality industry has been at the forefront of disruption since the pandemic's start. However, one of the important things for travel start-ups is to consider ensuring customer relations remain unaffected while trying to come out of the crisis. A travel company can establish strong customer relations that can trigger a sense of brand loyalty and trust from the customer's side regularly through customer interactions.

With the changing tastes of the customers, digital is the only way forward. Since people spend more time on social media, many travel small businesses are turning to social media platforms to connect with their users. These social media platforms are used by various businesses to sell products allowing potential customers to interact with brands, browse goods and make purchases. For instance,

• In June 2022, a US-based social media travel start-up, Tripscout launched its first online travel agency (OTA) for Instagram. Through the booking platform, customers can get exclusively negotiated discounted rates for several hotels worldwide. The customers, particularly, by sending a direct message (DM) with the word "hotel" to the @Hotel Instagram account, can get the rates. Most importantly, these private rates are (25-75) % below the publicly available rates on hotel websites and other OTAs.

This innovative start-up has an edge against its competitors from the price point. Since other OTAs are bound by a price parity agreement that compels them to publicly advertise hotel rooms at the same rate. However, Tripscout offers these discounted rates via chatbot over private DM. The hotels are, therefore, able to offer special discounted rates that the start-up negotiates for their customers.

Since social media acts as SEO, Tripscout need not spend separately on advertising. In comparison, other OTAs and booking websites have to spend heavily on paid advertising for a customer. Tripscout has nearly 30 million audiences, which is all organic and growing at a rate of nearly 1 million followers per month. Importantly, the start-up can help the customer save since this business is highly profitable, part of which is passed to travelers. Therefore, the discounts combined with its industry-leading organic audience size enables Tripscout to offer the most significant hotel deals in the industry, generating customer loyalty over the long run.

Moreover, Tripscout mainly focuses on the places that the audience is most interested in, such as New York City, London, Maldives and many more. Since this OTA is offering aspirational hotel customers see on Instagram at affordable rates, the platform is attracting significant customers driving customer acquisition, retention and conversion.

The platform approached the market differently. This has been easy as they have a strong presence on every social media platform. Tripscout prioritized Instagram as its most impactful tool for discovery, planning, and commerce for travel. Moreover, Instagram has around 2 billion users, and the average user spends more than 50 minutes per day on the platform. Therefore, the OTA is leveraging social media as an effective channel for travel marketing to acquire users, retain and drive conversion, for which Instagram is an ideal platform.

Tripscout, which built a large and loyal audience of frequent travelers and launched these game-changing private offers on Instagram, projected that in a post-pandemic world, it would witness substantial growth in its business over the long run. The OTA has broken the legacy of the travel industry, which is built on transactional interactions, driven by billions of annual advertising spend. Thus, this unique social commerce strategy will go a long way in helping start-ups in the space drive customer loyalty and growth in the travel business

To know more and gain a deeper understanding of the social commerce market in the United States, click here.