Guest Post: How travel tech companies can sharpen their product strategy to accelerate recovery

Unnur Osp, director of product at Kaptio, explains how travel technology firms have to adapt in the post-pandemic world to support the continuing modernisation and digitisation of the industry

Perhaps no sector has been as badly hit by the COVID-19 pandemic as tour operators, given their intrinsic connection to cross-border travel and human interaction. 

Many operators were seeing revenues down more than 80% even as other sectors like hotels and airlines are moving to a recovery.

Now that the pandemic has almost completely stopped interfering with people's everyday life and possibilities to travel, we are looking positively to what the future holds and how travel tech companies can impact the post-pandemic rise of multi-day travel brands.

 We have continuously been working closely with our customers to plot their recovery strategy, and find ways to emerge stronger out of the pandemic.

Our approach has been to focus the product development around the customer to really comprehend their needs and business goals, with the strategic objective of improving efficiency by enabling our customers to quote faster, sell more, with the same headcount. 

Becoming product-led, as a trusted travel tech partner

Since 2012, Kaptio has been on a mission to transform multi-day travel brands from being booking-centric to customer-centric, connecting the dots on one unified workspace for the entire customer journey. 

This decade-long experience has provided wealth of knowledge and deep insights about how to build a product vision and strategy in a way that enables our customers to increase their efficiency.  

Making the customer efficient is a key - reflecting that objective on to our internal work processes has pushed us to apply product-led principles in all our work. 

A very important milestone was refining our maximizing product offering, making it more out of the box type of product, resulting in spending less time doing service driven work and more time innovating.

Sharpening the focus and putting innovation at the center, allows the travel tech industry to reach new heights supporting multi-day travel brands

Conveying brand personality through rebranding

The recovery from the pandemic plus other intrinsic milestones and necessary organisational changes influence the way that travel tech companies operate. 

In this way, defining brand personality, strategically applying and communicating it became necessary. 

Being a product-led company, we designed the process around this initiative as every other product initiative - applied research and design methods to gain rich understanding of the current state and ultimately defined strategy to reach the desired state. 

Identifying our strength to enable customers to achieve their business goals

The results - understanding and defining who we are, and want to become, enables us to know what our strengths are and how we can use those to approach our product offering to our customers. 

In an ever growing and changing industry, a travel tech company needs to be in continuous explorative conversation with travel brands to evolve and enrich the understanding of their needs and business goals. 

At the same time, it becomes necessary to be iterative enough to transform the findings into a real value for the customers and ultimately the travelers. 

Accelerating post-pandemic recovery for multi-day tour operators

We are in an era of modernisation and digitisation. Both small and large tour operators will need to develop a full technology stack to take advantage of the supply chain shake-up and the rise of online booking platforms. 

Digitising the whole journey allows for more advanced sales analytics, quicker account reconciliation, reduced errors and ultimately enables travel brands to quote faster, sell more - with the same headcount. 

As we all reach post pandemic recovery - a new exciting future is ahead of the travel industry. 

The excitement that comes with helping shape this recovery and build the future of an industry is unprecedented. 

Kaptio will be at tomorrow’s Travolution European Summit holding one-to-one meetings with prospective travel clients. Delegates can still register for free to attend and organise their meeting.