How James Villas brings the personal touch back to booking holidays

Research­ing your next hol­i­day can some­times feel like a mil­i­tary oper­a­tion. Months of painstak­ing research, con­sid­er­ing the detail of upcom­ing trips while nav­i­gat­ing mul­ti­ple com­par­i­son web­sites and count­less peer reviews, all con­tribute to a mar­ket­place where mak­ing the right hol­i­day choice can be over­whelm­ing for consumers.

Hol­i­days bring peo­ple togeth­er by cre­at­ing mile­stone expe­ri­ences that evolve into sto­ries and mem­o­ries that are shared for the rest of their lives. So, when it comes to book­ing a hol­i­day, cus­tomers need be treat­ed to an expe­ri­ence that will match that lev­el of excite­ment and antic­i­pa­tion, leav­ing them con­fi­dent in their decision.

A data-dri­ven approach to per­son­alised cus­tomer expe­ri­ences presents mul­ti­ple oppor­tu­ni­ties. For James Vil­la Hol­i­days, appear­ing at exact­ly the right time, in the right places and with the right con­tent dur­ing the cus­tomer jour­ney was the company’s num­ber one goal to dif­fer­en­ti­ate itself in a high­ly com­pet­i­tive industry.

Over the past 35 years, the vil­la spe­cial­ist has seen the indus­try evolve from one large­ly built around offline, face-to-face inter­ac­tions, to an entire­ly dig­i­tal expe­ri­ence span­ning mul­ti­ple chan­nels. Each of James Vil­las’ 3,000 hol­i­day vil­las are hand­picked – a per­son­al and human touch that has been trans­lat­ed per­fect­ly into the company’s dig­i­tal presence.

Data has been the key to pro­vid­ing this more per­son­alised and tar­get­ed expe­ri­ence for hol­i­day goers. Using Adobe Ana­lyt­ics, James Vil­las has uni­fied data siloes and is shar­ing data seam­less­ly between its var­ied prod­uct port­fo­lio. From vil­la book­ings to car hire, and pack­age deals to air­port trans­fers, all busi­ness intel­li­gence is stored in one cen­tralised platform.

By uni­fy­ing these data silos and inte­grat­ing Adobe Ana­lyt­ics with Adobe Adver­tis­ing Cloud, James Vil­las can opti­mise the entire cus­tomer jour­ney, not only the final pur­chase. With Pay per Click (PPC) adver­tis­ing, the com­pa­ny has already enjoyed a 39% increase in con­ver­sion rates by focus­ing on each indi­vid­ual sec­tion of the cus­tomer jour­ney, rather than the end step. James Vil­las also under­stands the ben­e­fit of using Adobe’s arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence and machine learn­ing tech­nol­o­gy to help dri­ve its dig­i­tal strat­e­gy. Using fea­tures pow­ered by Adobe Sen­sei, James Vil­las is not only mak­ing online per­son­alised rec­om­men­da­tions for its cus­tomers, it is opti­mis­ing its paid search mar­ket­ing bud­gets.

Using the mantra ‘per­son­alised, rel­e­vant and sim­ple’, the team at James Vil­las works hard to ensure the research, dis­cov­ery and book­ing process for its cus­tomers is becomes seam­less and as enjoy­able as the hol­i­day they are about to take.

As this indus­try con­tin­ues to evolve, James Vil­las is proof that cus­tomer-cen­tric comms deliv­ers tan­gi­ble busi­ness results. Using data ana­lyt­ics and insights, the com­pa­ny has increased loy­al­ty, secured repeat busi­ness and cre­at­ed an agile busi­ness well placed to respond to an ever-evolv­ing landscape.

For more on how James Vil­las is using data to cre­ate the per­fect trav­el expe­ri­ence, watch their inspir­ing sto­ry here.