Recommending the next adventure based on insights in travel data
By using SAS® Viya®, travel agencies can find insights in travel data and use this to recommend and upsell travel products based on other travelers’ choices and preferences.
When travelers book their travel through travel agencies, they hope to make their trip easy to navigate and less stressful. Agents book hotels, flight tickets, car rentals, insurance and so much more. But they often neglect to help travelers find out how to spend their time once they have arrived at their destination - or even in transit between destinations. Most often, travelers are left to book their own sightseeing tours and other vacation activities.
By not taking charge of this part of the travelers’ experience, the travel agents lose an opportunity to upsell by utilizing what is perhaps their strongest asset: Knowledge of past experiences and reviews from other travelers. Agents have a lot data, but up until now, they have been unable to utilize it to upsell the right experiences.
As part of the SAS® Viya® Hackathon, a team from BIWise have demonstrated a solution to this problem: Utilizing existing data on people’s travel preferences to sell just the right cruise, jungle safari or other experience.
Finding the perfect tour or experience is a lot of work for the traveler. Travel agents have the information pieces that can complete the puzzle, and using the right data tools, we can help put them together in order to find the perfect experience. Klaus Palmelund Hackathon Team Lead BIWise
Insight to help make recommendations
Travelers have specific needs whether they are a family, a group of seniors, a 20-something traveling alone or anything in between. Each trip is different, but there are some common traits for most travelers; the desire to explore, be active, relax, try new food, or learn some historical facts about the place they are visiting.
To start producing insight, the BIWise team prepared data on one simple variable: Did the customer buy a tour already? Sample pipelines are run in SAS® Viya® using one of the available templates, and from this a model is created to give recommendations. The recommendations are designed by matching demographic such as age, gender and marital status with travel data about the destination, travel length, attributes on time spent between arrival and departure, season, and much more.
We hope that with this data solution, the travel agent will be able to offer a personalized recommendation that will result in more sales and happier travelers. Klaus Palmelund Hackathon Team Lead BIWise
Challenge
- Upselling of tours and activities based on insight from other travelers’ data are rarely used by travel agencies, meaning a lost upsell opportunity.
Solution
- Demographic data is prepared in SAS and afterwards moved into the SAS® Viya® environment.
- Sample pipelines are run in SAS® Viya® and by using one of the available templates a model is created to give recommendations.
Benefit
- Help travel agencies find insights in travel data and use this insight to upsell tours to travelers, based on other travelers’ choices
- Create a better customer journey and give more specific recommendations based on data.
About Hack In SAS Viya
In association with Intel and SAS Nordic User Group “Fans”. SAS hosted the competition “Smarter Together” for SAS partners. Here, teams of analysts and data scientists demonstrate the value of open data combined with SAS® Viya® in the cloud and open source technologies.
SAS provided the SAS® Viya® platform with a number of SAS tools in the cloud for easy access through saasnow.com. The nine participating teams built showcase based on a number of SAS software products including: Visual Analytics, Visual Statistics, Visual Data Mining & Machine learning, econometrics, and optimization.