Hilton Uncovers a Lot More About Blended Travelers After Student Competition
Hilton is finding out new ways to tap into one of the fast-growing segments of hospitality — thanks to a student competition.
The hotel group has just finished hosting an analytics challenge with Adobe Analytics. It asked students to identify the differences between business and leisure travelers, while keeping an eye on the emergence of the blended traveler.
Students were able to analyze live data from Hilton before pitching their “engagement strategies” targeted towards different traveler segments.
The hunt for new ways to target customers was prompted by the pandemic, according to Jess Petitt, senior vice president of commercial strategy, insights and analytics at Hilton. “We get much of the same travel patterns as we have in the past, but then you don’t get all of things back,” he said. “You get some segments of our business back, but you’ve also created new types.”
While “bleisure” has been discussed for a while, the hotel group was now focusing on so-called workcations.
“We’ve really seen that start to emerge in our business, but we want to understand it better, and understand how we can support that through hospitality service, and technology,” Petitt added. “You can start with stay patterns, you’ve got the type of hotel, there’ll be customer-modeling components that will come up in the future that are non-creepy ways of identifying the intent of a customer stay.”
