For many people, August means one thing – holiday season. Whether at the beach, beside the pool, exploring the world’s great cities or relaxing in scenic countryside, vacations are key milestones in people’s lives, and are widely anticipated throughout the year. 

For this reason, understanding customer experiences and opinions is vital to running a successful tourism and holiday business. However, the past five years have been hugely disruptive in the travel industry, from Covid-19 closing borders, to local restrictions, sometimes in place at short notice, and the financial pressures from maintaining travel routes, staff and income at a time where customers were unable or unwilling to book holidays. This has then bled into a cost-of-living crisis that has affected some people’s ability to book vacations, coupled with an upsurge in demand from others in the post-pandemic aftermath. 

Tui is one of Europe’s biggest names in travel, from package holidays to flights and a wide range of holiday experiences in between. Providing memorable holiday experiences is hard work, with a lot of factors that can impact on tourists’ enjoyment of their trip away. This provides significant challenges, but also opportunities, with customers in essence living with Tui for the duration of their stay at its hotels and resorts.  

Tui is acutely aware of the importance of annual holidays to its customers, says Kira Drabner, the company’s head of voice of the customer, who also points out how unique the travel industry is in comparison to other sectors. Customer feedback for holidays has a huge impact: mistakes on a holiday have the potential to cloud an individual’s view of a business for the rest of their lives, and the pressure on companies to effectively listen to and then act upon customer feedback is vital to success.  

“It is never realistic that you wouldn’t have disruptions or issues any more than any other customer journey,” Drabner says, “but the ability to understand and fix them when they are happening can make a massive difference for a holiday brand.” 

She adds: “When we think about holidays, for most people it is something that happens once a year. They save money for it, maybe for years, they plan it in, and a lot of energy goes into the whole process. Then the holiday itself is maybe a week or two, and it needs to be the right thing.   

“If that year-long saving and weeks of telling everyone that you’re going on holiday ends in it not being great, you’re not coming back. That’s what makes it challenging, but also what gives us a lot of opportunity. We have the customer on holiday with us for a period, so we have the chance to make it right.”  

Customer expectations 

The challenges facing tourism have also come at a time when technology is facilitating more personalisation of the customer experience – a great opportunity for the travel sector, as people’s ideal vacations can vary wildly. “A holiday is not one optimised process,” says Drabner. “Holidays mean something different to many people and what they are expecting from it. ‘What is a great holiday?’ can be so different [from person to person]. There are other products where it is clearer. That’s not really the case for holidays.” 

For this reason, data is vital to understanding what customers think about their holiday experience. “You would see if you went to any of our headquarters that customer comments, things like NPS [Net Promoter Score], are shown on all of the screens,” Drabner adds. “We make sure they are well-known numbers.” This is at all levels of the organisation, she explains, so that the customer voice plays a key role in decisions taken by hotel management as well as senior executives.  

Drabner says she wanted to see insight at Tui evolve, and involve “not just looking at two or three key KPIs but [have] the ‘why’ and insights become more part of the story as well”. As part of this, Tui employed experience management company Qualtrics to create an integrated programme covering 10 key customer touchpoints. This consolidated multiple tools and processes into a group-wide customer experience (CX) relationship programme that was designed to maintain consistency across all markets – with Tui operating in nine countries – and address local demands.  

The project marked a change in the way that insights were collected from customers, but Drabner says that the pandemic, beyond the significant challenges it wrought on the business, also acted as a catalyst for adopting the CX programme. “For some months the whole business was shut down – all initiatives were stopped. It was probably the most brutal impact you could have on a business, where for some time it wasn’t even clear if, as a brand, we would survive this. 

“But Covid also, in some way, helped to accelerate [changes]. It was no longer [about] whether people were ready for the change or not – the change was already happening. It helped us to fast-forward through a change process where otherwise it would have taken a bit longer to take people with us on the journey.”  

While the decision had been made to move to one, unified programme, a lot of departments internally had their own suppliers and systems for their own part of the business, Drabner adds, and people “weren’t fighting to be the first ones to migrate”. Covid-19 accelerated it as “all of a sudden, everything was put on hold” and people needed to make a case for projects to remain in use. This left an opportunity to move to the new system. 

The result was a voice of the customer programme that spanned the customer journey, from booking to checkout. This means, for example, that the company can respond to customer issues with their stay at check out, potentially addressing minor issues at source rather than weeks afterwards. “Now when guests leave feedback, the right people can access it in real time and then can do something about it, whether that is a hotel manager resolving an issue at checkout, or a colleague in customer case following up.” 

A different segment 

A strategic focus on greater personalisation of experiences has also seen a shift in how customers and potential customers are classified in the Tui CX system. Segmentation is usually how businesses categorise customer expectations and behaviours, but this has become increasingly problematic for tourism, where the focus is on tailoring to meet customer needs, no matter how obscure. No one expects an identikit experience from a tour operator or hotel, for example. 

Drabner says that as a result, the company is attempting to move away from putting customers into groups in favour of a more personal approach, but accepts that brings extra challenges and remains a work in progress. “There is no ‘a’, ‘b’ and ‘c’, but lots of in-betweens,” she explains. “There was always the understanding that there are very different customer needs and expectations, and the realisation that no matter how many groups you create, it will never be enough. That is now the challenge – to be more tailored to this true personalisation that doesn’t work in groups anymore.” Drabner says that achieving this is hard to do, and there is no perfect answer, but “that is where the journey is going to”.  

The company is using AI to better analyse customer feedback as well, providing more insight on customer behaviours and opinions to feed into service delivery. The use of agentic AI in its customer feedback process, for example, has seen 85% of customers who respond to a survey leaving ‘additional feedback’ following prompting from the AI chatbot, with 75% more detail than previously reported, according to Drabner. 

Tui is also looking at what Drabner calls ‘inner loop’ and ‘outer loop’ factors that can affect holiday enjoyment as part of its attempt to be more responsive to customers. In hotels, for example, Tui runs in-moment surveys that are monitored by the in-hotel management team, so very individual problems can be dealt with during someone’s stay, such as a problem with their room, for example.  

There are also ‘outer loop’ issues that are not directly connected to the work of the business. For example, the company received feedback that some airports covering its destinations have construction works. This poses issues for customers – they can get lost or be confused about where to go and can make them less likely to return to a destination regardless of how good their hotel was and how well cared for they were by Tui. In this instance, Tui responded by placing staff in those airports at key locations to reassure people and help holidaymakers get out of the airport and off to their holiday location.  

Drabner says that getting insight quickly from its destinations and into strategic decision-making processes is vital, given that it can make sure that customers do not face similar challenges during the rest of the peak travel season. “It’s a very seasonal business; you must be quick in order to not miss the chance. Then it would be the winter season; people go somewhere else, and the opportunity is gone.”  

It is in this speed of data analysis and in quickly gathering insight that AI could play a role in future. Drabner sees a particular benefit from data analysis and also from surfacing trends from customer comments and reviews. There remain challenges, however, one being language barriers. While many Tui customers speak English, German or French, which are well covered by AI tools, the company also has a large number of tourists with another native tongue such as Dutch or Danish. “We don’t want to leave these markets behind,” adds Drabner. “The use cases are very specific for those markets, as we have only a limited number of Danish-speaking staff, so it would be so helpful if the AI [chatbot] could interact with customers in their native language.” 

Understanding customer experiences and opinions will remain central to Tui’s model in the years to come. The challenge will be delivering the experiences that customers expect in a more demanding world. Drabner says: “It is about making sure that every guest on every journey feels heard and valued. Ultimately, it is about delivering on the promises we make.”