Australian Traveller Media uncovers insights into the travel customer journey

Image source: Australian Traveller Media.

After spending a decade traveling the world, Quentin Long realised that there was one beautiful country that he had never truly appreciated: his home of Australia. Long founded Australian Traveller Media around a simple premise: inspire Australians to see their own country. Australian Traveller and its sister brand International Traveller are mainstays in Australian media as magazines and websites that help inspire and advise.

“I’ve always loved travel,” says Long. “Travel is such an important part of people’s lives. It’s an expression of life and of connection. People trust us to help them create those special moments and I take that responsibility very seriously.”

Australian Traveller takes pride in helping travelers find just the right vacation, but when talking to industry partners, Long realised that many travel companies shared a problem: they lacked understanding and visibility into the full purchase journey beyond their ecosystem. Before travelers came to the travel company’s website and booked hotels, transport, or experiences, what other types of holidays were they looking at? How did they decide to book with that specific travel company? And most importantly, how could travel companies better stand out and attract more customers?

As a magazine with a wide audience of subscribers and website visitors, Australian Traveller is in a unique position to help travel companies gain insight into who travelers are and how to best market to them. The company teamed up with Helium to create a new service for travel companies, advertisers, and partners built on Adobe Analytics and Adobe Audience Manager.

“There’s a huge range in destinations across Australia that appeal to different people,” says Long. “Someone looking at a five-day hike across the Tasmanian wilderness wants something very different than someone thinking of going to Hamilton Island with the kids. And the same person may be looking at both trips at different times of the year. That’s why it’s so important for travel companies to have good visibility and insight into customers.”

The new service from Australian Traveller provides insights into audiences and marketing strategy that helps travel companies, advertisers, and partners better understand travelers using three main methods: tracking behaviours, testing ideas, and asking directly.

Tracking behaviours

Using Adobe Analytics, Australian Traveller gains real-time insights into how people react to digital content. When combined with the audiences created in Adobe Audience Manager, Australian Traveller can understand how content connects with travelers. Do families like hearing about deals or kid-friendly activities? Do they find inspiration from reading about seasonal events or recommended itineraries? By looking at what type of content different travelers consume, Australian Traveller can suggest ways for travel companies to draw the attention of target audiences.

Testing ideas

“One unique thing about Australian Traveller is that we’re not just providing insights, we can test them by using our platform as a sandbox for experimentation,” says Long.

Hamilton Island has worked with Australian Traveller for several years to help identify audiences and optimise its marketing strategy. Australian Traveller can create multiple articles about Hamilton Island and test which combinations of images, headlines, and content draw the most traffic. Hamilton Island then uses this information to influence its own marketing across social media, websites, and other digital platforms.

Asking directly

Sometimes the best way of understanding audiences is simply to ask. Australian Traveller embeds simple surveys into its websites to ask readers what they thought of the content, whether it made them want to visit, or whether they’d have preferred to read about something else. These surveys help validate what analysts are seeing, giving even greater confidence to the findings.

Learn more about how Australian Traveller Media worked with Helium to create a new digital service built on Adobe Experience Cloud.