Marketing continues to experience a profound shift as customers bring new demands to organizations, and the travel and hospitality industry is no different. Customers are in control of where and how they engage and they expect an intelligent, real-time conversation with resorts, destinations and travel planners. Interactive relationship marketing is a converged discipline that blends timeliness, the power of Web 2.0, granular personalization, and analytical marketing models with the principles of traditional database marketing and deep vertical-domain expertise to unify and choreograph online (real-time) and offline (episodic) marketing capabilities. By achieving a 360-degree view of customer interests and requirements, travel and hospitality marketers can achieve unprecedented levels of personalization, timing, relevance, cost-efficiency, and accountability.

Today’s Marketing Environment: More Options, More Speed, Less Control

In travel and hospitality, the fundamental nature of marketing is undergoing a profound change. Increasingly, customers are bringing dramatically different expectations to their travel decisions and interactions with organizations – about when, how, and where they choose to engage.

The Customer-Managed Relationship

Traditionally, the marketer has dictated the timing and pace of interactions. Today, travelers call the shots. They’re screening telemarketing calls and tossing unsolicited mail into the trash. E-mail deliverability rates are plunging as spam filters trap commercial e-mail – ...