LOCALIZATION ONLINE TRAVEL HOSPITALITY INDUSTRY

SUMMARY Localization and translation is an essential factor when defining the customer experience within the online travel and hospitality sector. Travelers and experience-seekers have access to volumes of content, published daily, providing consumers with countless options in planning for their next adventure. To be competitive, global marketers in the travel and hospitality industry must consider culturally adapting all forms of content and digital media to effectively reach the right audience, at the right time in their language of choice. If not, your potential consumer will go to where the content “speaks” to them.

In the e-commerce world, selling hotels, travel and hospitality to global business and leisure customers is one of the most highly competitive and rapid-growth areas. OTAs (online travel agencies) are generating huge revenue with gross reservations crossing the $35 billion mark in 2015, according to PhoCusWright.

Big online travel and hospitality brands have to ensure their user experience and online content is relevant, searchable and readable in all target cultures and languages. Engaging in the real-time world of social media is impacting market growth and sharing the competitive landscape of online travel sites. The experience is also being shaped by mobile devices and even wearables. Beyond basic content, localization strategies play a central role in digital media, data management, social media and business globalization plans. Welocalize has a wide breadth of knowledge of this industry and has helped many global travel and hospitality brands to go global, drive customer engagement and grow international revenue.

INTRODUCTION TO SUCCESSFUL GLOBALIZATION According to Euromonitor International report “The New Online Travel Customer,” global online travel sales accounted for $590 billion in 2013 (25% of total sales). Global online travel and hospitality sales are set to rise over the coming years, driven by a number of emerging global markets. According to the report, North America will grow at 7% CAGR through 2017. Western Europe will catch up with North America by 2017 with $207 billion and Asia Pacific online travel sales are set to double from $78 billion to $155 billion.

The business model of many online companies rely on content. This includes publishing product and service content, as well as taking the customer through a series of touch points to lead from initial awareness raising through to a successful booking and recognized revenue.

Every customer touch point is an opportunity for brands to engage with potential travelers and pleasure-seekers. From website, online advertising, social media, user interface and SEO, successfully managing the online customer experience is a key goal. Travel and hospitality brands have to be present and truly represented at every point of the experience; from research and booking through to traveling, arriving and leaving at the destination. At Welocalize, we see four key localization techniques that are crucial for the success of any online travel and hospitality company, looking to grow revenue and international reach.

1. MULTIMEDIA TEXT-TO-SPEECH (TTS) LOCALIZATION

KEY DRIVER: INCREASED USAGE OF ONLINE VIDEO & VIRTUAL REALITY CONTENT BEFORE BUYING

Tech-savvy travelers are using a plethora of digital tools to find out more about what their potential travel experience will be before they hit the buy button. Review and price comparisons have a large factor in this decision making process.

Consumers, both for personal and business, look to the Internet to inspire them and show current travel trends amongst their peers. The digital customer experience plays an important role in the buying journey. In fact, display and use of cultural imaging with the right language are primary selling tools. Thanks to the growth in technology and the prolific rise of video and audio sharing platforms, travel companies can push out video and virtual reality experiences to drive global marketing campaigns and promote their services.

Multimedia is permeating areas never reached before for many global brands in the travel and hospitality sector. Use of multimedia in brand and content marketing is eclipsing traditional sales and marketing tactics. According to video-sharing website, YouTube, they have over one billion users and four billion video views per day with 60% of a creators views coming from outside their home country.

Videos and virtual reality drive brand and social media campaigns. These techniques are used in the travel sector to visually capture a destination and evoke a positive travel experience. In Google’s travel tracking study, the 2014 Travelers Road to Decision, 42% of leisure travelers are inspired to travel by YouTube content.

Localizing video and audio for a global audience has often been limited due to budget decisions based on the expense of actors, voice talent, production engineering and studio rentals. Though there are ways to provide considerable savings by working with an experience language services provider like Welocalize, the latest developments in text-to-speech (TTS) technology also have opened up multimedia localization as a viable option for many global e-commerce brands.

Similar to UGC, certain video content does not have to be localized to the same high production standards as film or television advertisements. Rather than recording and filming localized versions with actors in a studio, translated scripts can simply be loaded into synthetic voice software and into phonetic text. This enables global brands to further leverage linguistic assets to reach wider audiences.

Virtual reality is still a relatively new marketing tool. It is cited to grow fast and suits the nature of the online travel and hospitality. It has a refreshing take on the billions of videos that are uploaded to YouTube and Facebook and holiday pictures already shared on Instagram and Snapchat.

As new techniques are used to market and promote online travel and hospitality, advancing localization technologies, like TTS, are emerging to meet client requirements and opening up paths for new global markets. Travel companies can now use video as a key marketing tool to reach customers in multiple language markets.

2. MACHINE TRANSLATION (MT) POST-EDITED MACHINE TRANSLATION

KEY DRIVER: CONTINUED GROWTH IN USER-GENERATED CONTENT (UGC)

Large travel organizations have made user-generated content core to their business model; therefore, UGC is probably the highest volume type of content generated in the travel and hospitality industry today.

Welocalize highlighted the impact of UGC on localization and translation requests at the 2015 Globalization and Localziation Association (GALA) conference. Click here to see Welocalize presentation, Localizing for Travel: Diverse Solutions for Diverse Needs, which addresses UGC and quality in travel translation.

With high levels of competition in the online travel and hospitality market, there is a need for high impact marketing content that requires transcreation. For the high volumes of UGC, this requires a lower-cost, high velocity localization solution. Welocalize client, TripAdvisor, the world’s largest travel site, reports they operate in 45 countries worldwide and hosts 250 million user reviews and opinions from travelers around the world. (Source: http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/PressCenter-c4-Fact_Sheet.html)

Online travel and hospitality companies must have an efficient and scalable localization solution in place to handle the high volume UGC. Machine translation (MT) is emerging as a key tool for this industry. MT enables UGC content to be translated and reposted immediately to set quality levels. Raw MT output won’t be as polished or to such a high editorial standard as a transcreated marketing campaign; however, it will meet the expectations of online travelers who will understand the content. The lower quality levels are deemed appropriate for this type of content and does not negatively impact the brand, as the consumer has set expectations on the “gist” of native language content from global brands.

As well as using raw MT, many organizations are using MT with light post-editing (PEMT) and increasingly, MT teamed with crowdsourcing solutions. Higher volumes of PEMT can be processed when compared to straight human translation.This means more can be translated for less budget. MT output can also be put through a “crowd” that is appointed to comment and vote on the best MT translations, where translations receiving the highest votes are then posted. Addressing MT output is one way of improving translation quality. The other is to look at the source. The better the source and MT engine training, then the better the MT output.

It is widely known and “accepted” that UGC often contains grammatical and spelling errors. Key to successful MT is to focus on normalization by training the MT engine to pick up frequent and common misspelling, date patterns and other format irregularities. This will include training the MT engine to deal with non-standard input, for example: emoticons, abbreviations and acronyms and socially used phrases like gr8 (great), lol (laugh out loud) and others. All these writing techniques are very common in travel reviews and automation of the translation process must recognize this non-standard content.

3. SOFTWARE, APPS TECHNICAL DOCUMENTATION LOCALIZATION

KEY DRIVER: MULTIPLE PLATFORMS AND DEVICES UTILIZED DURING ENTIRE TRAVEL PLANNING AND

BOOKING PROCESS

Device, mobile and app considerations are critical at all stages of travel planning and each type of engagement influences booking decisions. Most travelers use their smartphone throughout the whole travel process, before, during and after their travel experience. Nearly 50% of users visited Tripadvisor via tablet and smartphone.

Like any content, software, apps and any supporting technical content or documentation, should always be culturally optimized for every target market. All digital touch points have to be optimized for mobile to ensure travelers push through from engagement through to booking if they are using a mobile device for the whole process. By applying good internationalization and localization practices for developing source and localized versions of software and apps, travel and related content can be easily accessible in all target markets from all devices and platforms.

Smartphones and tablets tend to have relatively small screens; therefore, require a reduced user interface. There is often increased use of icons and less text. For any text that does appear in the mobile version, developers have to accommodate for any text expansion resulting from translation. German and Russian can be nearly 40% longer than English. Travelers may also switch between devices throughout the travel planning and booking process. This means not only adapting codes and content for software in the source, as well as in all localized versions, on all platforms.

Continual growth and usage of mobile is driving the increase in demand for software and app localization for this industry. In addition to software and app localization, any supporting online help and technical documentation has to be part of the localization process. If you access a travel site in standard Chinese, then you want any online help to also be in Chinese. All customer touch-points have to be in the same language.

Driving online digital marketing campaigns is an important part of any global e-commerce operation. Search Engine Marketing (SEM), which incorporates SEO (organic search) and PPC (paid search) is a key tool to drive traffic to travel and hospitality sites.

A traveler’s journey often starts at the laptop, smartphone or tablet, gathering information, reading reviews and recommendations before eventually deciding and booking travel arrangements. Key search engines like Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Ask, AOL, Baidu and Naver will often lead travelers to travel-related sites like Tripadvisor and Expedia. Many organizations are jostling to get their brand ranked high within the popular search engines. SEO and SEM matters.

In Google’s travel tracking study, the 2014 Travelers Road to Decision, it highlighted the growing trend is for leisure travelers to use search engines as their first step in trip planning. Noting that 83% of respondents in the study use social networking, video or photo sites to inspire their next journey, followed by 60% using search engines and 42% using travel review sites and apps. This simply stresses the importance of SEM, SEO, PPC and keywords to attract and win new travel customers. Online travel content has to be searchable and it needs to be translated to rank in different languages. Culturally optimized content is imperative to a successful online presence in the travel and hospitality sector. Clicks equal visits, visits equal conversions and conversions equal positive ROI, according to Huw Aveston, Managing partner at Traffic Optimiser, Welocalize partner for multilingual SEO.

Localizing potential search results is a necessity for any online global marketing strategy. It is not about straight translation of tags and keywords but the culturalization of global content. SEM is a key component of any global marketing campaign therefore has to be part of the overall localization strategy.

4: LOCALIZATION OF SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING, SEO PAY-PER-CLICK CAMPAIGNS

KEY DRIVER: DIGITAL IS PRIMARY SOURCE FOR TRAVEL ENGAGEMENT & BOOKING

YOU NEED TO BE FOUND!

1. Online travel and hospitality companies are selling experiences. They must use online content to differentiate and depict experiences for customers all over the world.

2. Global online travel and hospitality sales are set to rise. Western Europe will catch up with North America by 2017 with $207 billion and Asia Pacific online travel sales are set to double from $78 billion to $155 billion. (Source: Euromonitor International report, The New Online Travel Customer)

3. Ecommerce in the travel and hospitality sector is driven by content. Online travel companies rely on content to take the customer through a number of touchpoints and must engage customers throughout the whole process: from information seeking and booking right through to travelling, arriving, leaving, review and feedback.

4. Continued growth in UGC is driving increased use of MT and PEMT. Welocalize client, Tripadvisor hosts over 250 million user reviews. High levels of UGC in the travel and hospitality industry have resulted in MT and PEMT going primetime to handle large volumes and emerging language markets.

5. Increased use of online video in global marketing campaigns requires multimedia localization. 42% of travelers are inspired to travel by YouTube. Emerging techniques like TTS enable global travel companies to localize more video content to reach a wider audience.

6. Travelers use multiple platform and devices to plan and book travel. Mobile is critical at all stages of online travel. Content must be optimized for all mobile devices and consistently applied across all touchpoints.

7. You need to be found! With so many travelers engaging with content digitally, travel sites must be found with clever multilingual SEM campaigns.

8. Partner with an experienced Language Service Provider (LSP). To achieve successful globalization and localization, LSPs can help online travel and hospitality companies to develop a strategy to support the brand, reach new markets and align with overall business goals.

E I G H T K E Y TA K E AWAY S :

Welocalize provides customer-centric translation and localization solutions for leaders in the online travel and hospitality sector. Our experience in developing customer-centric solutions with international hotel groups, online travel sites and airlines enables us to advise and support clients who are looking to compete and win new traveling consumers.

Whether expanding geographic regions, launch new service lines, going from online to mobile apps, our experience can help you grow globally. Contact us today to talk to our travel and hospitality industry experts.

For more information visit www.welocalize.com.