An Online Travel Agency’s (OTA) relationship with Flight Booking Abandoners can be summarized in one sentence: Love them or hate them but you can’t ignore them.
Flight Search Abandonment often hurts the topline of most OTAs. It’s a situation where a visitor searches for a flight but doesn’t checkout. And this has compelled OTAs to shell out millions of dollars on acquisition as well as retention of customers.
There are numerous reasons for travel booking abandonment. And the top 4 of them are:
ALSO READ: How Goibibo used Hyper-Personalization in Emails to Increase Conversions by 11%
Of course, the best way to deal with search abandonment is by implementing an abandoner recovery campaign via a customer journey workflow. However, taking this workflow from Level A to B by making it adaptive based on buyer personas is something we have been working on. After all, who doesn’t like a shiny conversion rate 😉
Also Read: User Persona Guide With Examples
How to create an adaptive, persona-based customer journey for flight search abandoners
Suppose XYZ is a flight booking mobile app. It wants to increase its look-to-book ratio by periodically nudging the flight search abandoners via triggered+personalized Push Notification. Moreover, it wants to automate this process with a user retention workflow and make it ongoing with the help of WebEngage Journey Designer.
We know that search abandoners often leave crumbs of information like destination city, date of departure and arrival, preferred flight, preferred time, etc. Hence, XYZ employs this data to create two buyer personas of travelers: Business Traveller and Holiday Traveller. And based on these personas, it zeros down to the approach for the frequency of communication.
While Business Travellers are reached out aggressively in a short time-frame, Holiday Travellers are nudged in a more spread-out approach in a longer time-frame.
However, XYZ doesn’t want to run two separate campaigns for both personas. Hence, it creates an all-inclusive workflow (see below) which is not only adaptive but also targeted.
(To learn more about WebEngage Journey Designer, click here)
The workflow is divided into 3 sections: Aggressive, Spread-out and Time-out.
Section I: Aggressive
This section of the journey is for a Business Traveller whose Date of Departure is within the next 7 days of the date of flight search. Suppose XYZ’s mobile app user, Alex, does the following inquiry on 16 May and drops off on the search page:
Alex, who falls under the Business Traveller persona, will become the part of this section of the journey.
As XYZ has chosen the aggressive approach for Alex, it will send 3 push notifications (shown below) within the span of 5 days.
Section II: Spread-out
This section of the journey is for Holiday Travellers whose Date of Departure was after the next 30 days. Now suppose Josh searches for the following flight on 16 May and doesn’t checkout within the next 30 minutes:
As Josh falls under the Holiday Travellers persona, he will become the part of this section of the journey:
Since XYZ has chosen the spread-out approach for Josh, it will send 3 push notifications (shown below) in the span of 30 days.
Section III: Timeout
This last part removes the user from the journey on the day of the departure date that was selected by him/her. So Alex and Josh will move out of the journey on 22 May and 18 June, respectively.
The most amazing thing about customer journey mapping is that it can be adopted by any industry. To know more about WebEngage Journey Designer, check out this Blog Post or this Explainer Video. If you want to learn how this Journey Designer will compliment your B2C business, schedule a free demo now. We would love to have a chat with you 🙂
Vanhishikha Bhargava 
Prakhya Nair 