How can travel brands have more regular contact with customers and can sound play a role in it?

It’s no secret that one of the many challenges travel brands face is the frequency with which their customers are willing to engage with them. Vacation planning and booking is not a year-long activity for most people. And travel brands must hit those time windows to produce bookings.

Keeping consumers engaged outside the travel booking and planning spectrum was the starting topic for this year’s Travolution European Summit panel, “Feeling Supersonic”. It raised the question rarely asked by the travel industry: can sound have a role to play in this?

Experts from Travelzoo, Global Radio and Sound Travel joined me to explore exactly how travel brands can relate and appeal to their customers by connecting with the emotional side of sound.

The discussion began with two success stories. These two examples, explored in the panel, are living proof that sound is, indeed, a powerful marketing tool. Jet2 and British Airways are two companies that have theme songs that are recognizable, especially by UK consumers. These songs have become compelling branding tools. One simple scroll through this comment section shows how people have been associating holiday moods with sound. 

Additionally, we explored the emotional connection people associate with music. Most people have at least one song that reminds them of a particular vacation experience.  But can this emotional aspect be useful for travel brands?

Sound memory is a long-lasting memory and therefore has a big potential for long-term branding. The challenge is how to figure out what songs people listened to on their vacation and when/how to replay them again. What would be extremely powerful ultimately would be to figure out when someone is thinking about booking holidays based on the music they are listening to. This is a challenge that travel marketeers might want to think about going forward. 

My fellow panellist Jo McCrostie mentioned that sound also has the potential to trigger short-term actions.  She mentioned how JustEat is a perfect example of this and how they are betting on this approach in the UK market. 

This strategy could also be transferable to the travel industry, at least to a certain degree. Sound is used to amplify emotions, and already simple sounds like the sound of waves might increase a consumer’s tendency to plan their next vacation. Of course, the challenge that the travel industry has is that it’s much more difficult to trigger spontaneous buying decisions than for the food and restaurant industry, which serves daily needs.

The last question discussed was why the travel industry is currently not at the forefront when it comes to using sound as a marketing tool. This might be due to the fact that the travel market already has a powerful emotional side attached to it and hence the travel industry was not actively looking for other ways to enhance emotions.

With the industry shifting from the booking process and focusing more on the entire travel lifecycle, not using sound as part of the experience might soon seem like a wasted opportunity.