Last week I was privileged to attend a workshop on tourism and hospitality dubbed “Technology and Data in Tourism” and boy was that insightful. The tourism industry has undergone a significant transformation with the widespread adoption of technology. Right from booking platforms to data analytics and digital marketing, technology has transformed the way the industry operates. By embracing the power of technology, businesses can now improve their efficiency, enhance the customer experience, and gain a competitive edge in a constantly evolving industry.
In this piece, I share some of the poignant lessons from the workshop sponsored by Mastercard Foundation in collaboration with Centri and CDC. The team from South Africa through research in our local Tourism sector had so much to share about opportunities available for us to drive growth in our Tourism and Hospitality sector for our economy. From their research, they made the following key observations. They identified 3 contextual realities as follows; first, “Tourism is a key economic contributor to the Ghanaian economy and an important source of employment albeit still recovering from the Covid pandemic”.
Second, “Digital technology and data present an opportunity to stimulate growth, but both remain underutilized in the Ghanaian tourism sector”. Third, “Tourism is a national policy objective and is a cornerstone of the Government’s economic and social development strategy”. The presentation highlighted several opportunities for us as a country to explore value-added services to enhance our competitiveness within the West African sub-region and perhaps beyond. What caught my eye was the bit about how tourists decide where they want to visit. As a CX advocate, this is where I have a very keen interest.
I am all for how we can improve CX to enhance our attractiveness as a country and become a destination of choice for the average tourist. The reality though is that as is the case in any other business we are dealing with a competition and to achieve our goal of drawing in significant traffic we need to get our act together. If I remember right one of the goals set from the Peduase Summit was that Ghana aims to attract two million tourists in the next two years and the revenue target for this is $4bn. I wasn’t privileged to be at Peduase however I was careful to listen in on some of the discussions and learned a lot about the desire we have to improve the sector.
This is why the workshop held last Friday, 11 August, 2023 intrigues me. Sitting in the workshop and hearing the stark realities of our low usage of data and technology in the sector, I wondered about how much progress we expect to make on this journey in terms of our expectations and the realities on the ground. Here are a few lessons I came away with on the potential for enhanced customer experience in our hospitality and tourism space. First, we must leverage data and technology to inform our planning and execution in the sector. Second, the larger hotels are using technology to good effect and have a head start on our local hotels.
Third, our world today has gone digital therefore if we want to compete with the rest of the world then we need to have a potent digital strategy to enable us to support our drive for enhanced tourism and hospitality with efficient processes. Fourth, an effective digital strategy will pave the way for us to improve the tourist journey from end to end. There are some insightful learnings from the Egyptian experience. Fifth, an effective digital strategy will improve significantly our capacity as a nation to guage customer sentiments more accurately and deliver initiatives that will make their experiences great.
Leveraging Data and Technology
Data and digital technology have the potential to unlock such things as the motivation for tourists visiting Ghana. The question asked here was, “What makes a good tourist experience for you? These were identified as exciting, accessible, simple, and convenient. Three countries were identified as being the source of most tourists who come to Ghana. These are the USA, 12 percent, the UK 8 percent, and Nigeria, 5.2 percent. The question here is, are our tourist sites attractive enough to generate further interest besides these sources identified? The typical tourist journey tells the story lucidly.
A typical tourist journey starts with awareness. What it means is that to trigger awareness we must have great visibility. In today’s world, this visibility is mainly digital. Anyone from any part of the world seeking to travel anywhere will first go online. In their research, they will be looking for places of interest. At this stage in the journey, the potential for Ghana as a destination is quite high as there is no shortage of places of interest. The next touchpoint in the journey would be where there is easily available information that builds trust, confidence, and desirability. At this stage, the tourist is looking to make a shortlist.
Sadly, at this stage in the tourist journey Ghana’s opportunities thin out in comparison to a place like Egypt for example. During the Booking and payment stage, the tourist is looking for simplicity and convenience with responsive communication. The tourist will make a decision at this point based on convenience. The next stage is the in-country experience where the need for coordination and quality service is paramount. Having experienced the service, the tourist is now encouraged to share the experience with others. Digital touchpoints to manage the tourist journey will enable us follow through and capture these sentiments accurately
The Larger Hotels
One key discovery from the research is that Business is the primary driver of tourist arrivals in Ghana, with many travelers staying on to experience heritage and eco-tourism offerings. Many of these business tourists patronize the larger hotels where the services are comparable to other parts of the world. Many of these hotels have the infrastructure to manage business processes at the backend and have capabilities to assess customer sentiments using appropriate Voice of Customer tools supported with technology solutions that enhance the guest experience significantly from mobile check-in to keyless room entry.
A plethora of technology touchpoints add to the guest experience in more than one way. Contactless check-in and keyless entry allow guests to use their smartphones to access their rooms and other hotel amenities. It not only reduces the need for physical contact but also provides guests with a more convenient and streamlined check-in process. Mobile apps offer capabilities for ordering room service, requesting housekeeping, and even controlling room temperature and lighting. These hotels with the help of artificial intelligence and machine learning, are able to collect and analyze guest data.
This enables them to provide personalized recommendations and experiences such as customized room amenities, personalized dining recommendations, and even personalized fitness plans. Many of these facilities may seem over the top however there are simpler alternatives that offer comparable capabilities in tracking customer behaviour with the view to provide enhanced experiences. The larger hotels have no shortage of digital technologies and data to anticipate the needs of their guests and provide out-of-world experiences to keep them coming again and again. The local hotels have equal potential, we just need to plan the experience intentionally.
Digital Strategy
We learned here that technology is being used by public and private sector players in the tourism industry to enhance the guest experience, streamline operations, improve communication, increase revenue, and enhance security. A myriad of available tools including virtual reality exist where customers are able to view a hotel room, read descriptions, view images, look at videos, read customer reviews, or seek opinions on social media. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube allow businesses to create and distribute engaging content to a large audience.
They provide an opportunity for service providers to build relationships with customers and establish their brands. The use of Chatbots in hotels, airlines, and restaurants offers opportunities for improvements to booking processes and faster customer service response times. I am looking forward to the times when a meal order will take not more than 20 minutes for our local delicacies. The wait times for these meals can be stretchy. The research revealed further that tourism accounts for over 10 percent of global GDP, with technology playing an essential role in contributing to its growth.
The presentation revealed further that an estimated 36.3 percent of the 5.19 billion people using the internet, use it to research places, vacations, and travel. 82 percent of travelers are booking travel or tourist activities through a website or mobile app. Online travel booking accounts for 63 percent of the approximately $1.2 trillion the travel industry generates every year. The insight here is that regardless of the size of your business there are great opportunities to enhance your visibility. An improved customer journey has the potential to draw in significant traffic year on year to cash in on the demands of the market.
The Egypt case study
The team shared a very insightful lesson on the effective use of digital technology from the Egypt experience we could draw some strands. They are used variously for attracting tourists, simplifying travel, and enhancing the experience. These include national campaigns incentivizing visits and targeted campaigns with digital advertising on websites, social media, and in prominent spaces in places outside Egypt such as Time Square in NY. Additionally, they offered 50 percent off accommodation and entry into certain sites for ticket holders to the World Cup in Qatar.
One of the things they have done so well is to create digital pages for the Ministry and for key museums and heritage sites. These are available on various social media platforms (Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube channel). To simplify travel they have Introduced the e-Visa Portal where a tourist can apply for and receive their Visas online. How cool is that, I recall how laborious it was for me to renew my passport at the Ghana High Commission in London some years ago, I hope the process has improved now with the digitization and all. Perhaps not, in the USA, tales of frustration with Passport and Visa processes at the Ghana mission abound.
A portal has been developed in cooperation with the Chamber of Companies, Travel and Tourism Agencies, to achieve linkage with flight reservation systems, hotels, and agents. To enhance the tourist experience they have Introduced a cashless payment system to purchase entry tickets, covering the most prominent methods of payment, at all key heritage sites and museums. This is ably supported by enhancing digital infrastructure for technical services (digital museums, virtual reality, and smart communication). Furthermore, they have launched the first-ever digital platform for yacht tourism.
The Tourist Journey
There are great lessons to learn from the Egypt experience of how we can leverage data and technology to leapfrog our tourism in the sub-region. A number of use cases were identified as indicators of our digital touchpoints. For marketing purposes technologies currently in use to enhance the experience include Google location, Social media (preferred over websites) word of mouth (dominant), Online listings, and aggregator platforms. An aggregator platform is a site that collects data from other sources across the internet and puts the information in one place where users can access it.
Many of our hotels (local ones), have no websites of their own and tend to rely heavily on aggregator platforms. Payment methods include Mobile money and cash (these are the most dominant). Online payments and Exchange Traded Funds (EFTs) are accepted at larger institutions
There is distrust in credit cards due to high fraud rates. Commonly used tools are WhatsApp and telephones, and Google Forms for collecting customer feedback with E-mail is used to a lesser extent a participant shared an experience where a client was communicating with a hotel on email with no response forthcoming.
If we want to be part of the Tourism narrative, we must improve our communications. A client we dealt with some years ago intimated to us about our poor email culture. Although many have online systems for booking, these are hardly used in real time. Their email was only used for payslips and not much else. In terms of backend operations, the minority use digital tools for logistics, (mostly, Excel) but records etc are kept manually. Our touchpoints lack the visibility others have developed, until we cash into the digital currency our quest for tourism success will continue to be more of a narrative than reality.
If we want to apply the right levers to enhance our Tourism and Hospitality sector then we must be prepared to embrace technology and amend our processes to align with best practices. There is no doubt that our potential for Tourism growth is great however to leverage this opportunity we will need fit for purpose systems to enhance our visibility in a highly competitive market. The learning curve for us is quite steep clearly we need to back the narrative with tangible actions. Kudos to the Mastercard team, so much knowledge has been passed on to us. Perhaps we can draw from scripture and say “to whom much is given, much will be expected”.
| The Writer is a Management Consultant (Change and Customer Experience). He can be reached on 059 175 7205, [email protected], https://www.linkedin.com/in/km-13b85717/
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