A leading digital marketing solutions facilitator for the travel industry, Sojern, has announced its expansion into the South African market. This expansion is being undertaken so as to capitalize on the rising tourism post the pandemic. 

The travel industry suffered a setback after Covid-19 rocked the world. But with travel and tourism picking up pace after the ripples of the Omicron variant began to fade away. 

So what role exactly is Sojern playing in the South African travel industry? Let us have a look. 

Tourism recovery research

Sojern Insights has been the mettle behind tourism recovery research. It has worked in association with biggies like UN World Organization, The Pacific Asia Travel Association, and Skift Research. Sojern chalks out weekly self-serve travel insights to help different pillars in the travel sector. Hotels, tourist attractions, tourism boards, and flight booking services – all reap the benefits of insights. These insights are a good way to comprehend travel behavior, and they help devise a plan for recovery. 

Areas of research touched by Sojern Insights 

Sojern offers insights into different players in the travel market. Despite the travel sector being strongly affected by the pandemic, Sojern continues to work with thousands of hotels, attractions, airlines, and destinations annually around the world. Here are a few interesting analytics about the South African travel industry that Sojern has put forth.

1. Flight booking insights

Sojern concluded from its research that flight bookings were up by 25% in the year 2021.

2. Destination insights

Destinations like Kimberley and Bloemfontein are up YoY, however, are still a long way off their 2019 booking and search volumes.

3. Data on dynamic flight pricing

COVID-19 caused a drastic drop in inbound flight prices. However, international fares into South Africa are now in fact higher than their 2019 levels

4. Insights on domestic travel

Sojern Insights pointed out that 49.9% of flight bookings to South Africa originate in South Africa. This demonstrates how crucially important domestic travel is.

5. Data on advance booking by travelers

Most domestic travel is immediate, while overseas visitors are booking their December holiday trips to South Africa already. Interestingly, international travelers are booking further in advance in 2022 than they did in 2019. On the other hand, domestic travelers are booking closer to their departure dates than they did pre-pandemic.

How Sojern Insight’s entry is a boon

Sojern is a leading digital marketing platform built for travel marketers. It is powered by artificial intelligence and traveler intent data. Sojern provides multichannel marketing solutions to drive direct demand. Thousands of hotels, attractions, tourism boards, and travel marketers rely on Sojern annually to engage and convert travelers around the world.

Sojern has established itself as the key partner for tourism professionals. It supports travel businesses in their ongoing recovery. With Sojern, the South African travel industry can now harness the latest marketing technology. This can be used to drive direct bookings, increase web traffic, develop loyalty programs, and more.

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Sojern, the travel tech company known for its traveler path-to-purchase data and innovative travel marketing and distribution solutions, today announced that growth equity firm TCV has led a $120 million financing round in Sojern.

Sojern looks to build on its years of rapid growth and successful execution—recently marking 13 consecutive quarters of profitability—to accelerate solutions development for its clients, which include 93 percent of the world’s Fortune 500 travel companies and thousands of independent hotel properties and local tourism providers. As part of the transaction, TCV general partner Woody Marshall joined Sojern’s Board of Directors. TCV brings extensive experience in the travel and marketing tech spaces with investments in Airbnb, Expedia, HomeAway, TripAdvisor, SiteMinder, ExactTarget, Act-On and Ariba.

Sojern offers a scalable model for driving bookings through a blend of programmatic display, video, social, mobile and native advertising tailored to reach travel audiences as they move through the process of planning and researching an upcoming trip. The company has closely followed trends in travel marketing, acquiring Facebook and Instagram Marketing Partner Adphorus in late 2017, testing into connected TV, and making its real-time audiences available to top clients via a programmatic in-house offering.

“At Sojern, we aim to know all the world’s travelers and move them from dream to destination. Our teams dig deep into the traveler path-to-purchase so we can help our clients win the competition for bookings. We’ve used those insights to drive $13 billion in bookings so far, with the goal of transforming digital marketing into digital distribution,” said Sojern CEO Mark Rabe. “With this new partnership with TCV, we’re excited to continue driving efficiency into the ~$100 billion being spent by travel brands around the world.”

Woody Marshall said, “We have been watching Sojern’s rapid rise in the travel technology space for several years, and we were impressed with Sojern’s leadership position in the space and its unique, scalable model for influencing travelers worldwide. Sojern’s ability to both conceptualize a better marketing experience for travel organizations and their steady execution over the past decade, as well as their innovative business strategy, strong executive team, and inspiring company culture made them a natural fit for us.”

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Travel market is growing year over year with an expansive viewpoint that doesn’t leave any platform under the rock. The entire tourism industry knows the power of social media and how this could leverage travel marketing and conversions in their favour. Consumers have increasingly turned to mobile to get itinerary ideas, compare flight fares, or reserve experiences.

To dig more into this, Google Internal Data partnered with Sojern International, a global performance marketing engine for travel brands and built a complete path-to-purchase trend. ‘Micro-moments’, as they’d like to call it, is a term defined by Google analysts where a well-positioned brand can define a consumer’s behaviour through his decision patterns and choices he makes online. They analysed booking data from 350 anonymous traveller profiles and came to an exceptional outlook at traveller’s journey across video, online and mobile platforms.

Where are the people heading: Emerging spots this year

You Tube has come out to be on top of the list for people to get their travel inspirations and ideas. These media platforms are great at gauging people’s interest and purchase intent. The handful of destinations that rose in the first half of this year as the rising searches are:

1. Reykjavik
2. Havana
3. Toronto
4. Mexico City
5. Tokyo

Travel hacks and You Tube goes hand-in-hand

Travellers just don’t want to get their inspirations right but also their trip right. The experience that they’ve craved for should be made sure that it’s worth. And they get this right by hopping from one video to another that probably talks about tips to stay hydrated on a flight or perhaps how to minimise jet lag.

According to the data studied, travel hacks got searched on You Tube with an 115% increase over last year with a maximum influx from mobile devices. In a similar fashion, search interest went up by 16 times, hitting an all time hit in July in four years.

Mobile for research and desktop for booking

The mobile platform has been extensively used for researching whereas the desktop predominates the purchase market. Weekend searches with respect to travel on mobile outpace the desktop. And interestingly, destinations peak up on Tuesdays. Mobile searches help the brand stay top-of-mind when traveller starts thinking purchase.

Travellers use mobile to be spontaneous

Smartphones are the on-ground research tools for leisure travellers. Mobile allows travellers to be spontaneous once they reach the destination. 85% o f leisure travellers decide on their activities after reaching their destination. 50% of international travellers use a smartphone to look for things at their arrival.

India has a huge potential of becoming a ground breaking tourism market. It has a growing number of smart phone users and the millennial population is travelling with more experiential streak within them. This report comes as breath-of-fresh-air for the prospects the travel and tourism market has in store for the marketers.

Travel marketers need to evolve with the ongoing trends and as it is clearly visible, You Tube is the new search engine for the millennial. To know more about this report published last month, log on to thinkwithgoogle.com.

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The travel and tourism industry is the second fastest growing sector globally. According to Skift report, its GDP was nearly $2.4 trillion in 2014 i.e.representing 3.1% of global GDP. Observing this exponential growth, many travel startups have come into existence in the past few years.

Sojern – the world’s leading data-driven performance marketing engine – has recently published its periodical report which analysed travel behaviour in five regions: Asia-Pacific, Latin America, Europe, Middle East & Africa, and North America. This report mostly focused on the travelling behaviour of individuals from October to December 2015. We have listed below few key points for your easier understanding:

North America

Many international travellers have showed interest in visiting North America. The most searched destinations of this region were Chicago, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami and New York City.

In winters, most of the inbound travellers were inclined to experience the breathtaking beaches of North America. From July to November last year, innumerable US travellers booked trips to Miami and Ft. Myers. Also, they visited summer destinations like Cancun, San Juan and San Diego. 55% of all such trippers were solo travellers and one-third of them opted to travel as part of a couple. New York City and Las Vegas were ranked in the top five for international hotel destinations.

Latin America

Focusing on hotel trends of last year, the top two domestic hotel destinations for Mexican travellers were Cancun and Puerto Vallarta. For Brazilians, the top two hotel destinations were Rio de Janeiro and Natal. The chart below further elaborates this information:

It has been observed that Miami is rapidly shaping up as the number one searched destination for travellers of Argentina, Brazil and Colombia this year. Cancun makes into the top five list of destinations for Mexican, Argentinean and Colombian travellers.

Europe

The most searched European destinations by international travellers were London, Amsterdam, Paris, Lisbon and Barcelona. During winters, many Europeans prefer visiting Dubai and Bangkok. Other popular destinations are Barcelona, Malaga and Alicante. On the other hand, French and German trippers showed keen interest in visiting Bangkok during winters. Dubai was the second most visited place for German travellers and Barcelona for the French travellers.

Interestingly, 47% of UK travellers, 48% of German travellers and 45% of French travellers opted to explore different international destinations as a couple.

Middle East and Africa

In the Middle East, people prefer travelling with families. Saudi Arabia and Israel showed the biggest shift towards family travel in summer with peak shares of 22% of all travel interest for Saudi Arabia in July and 20% for Israel in August last year.

Turkey and Istanbul were considered to be the top destinations from July to September, 2015. In this year, India and Philippines are predicted to be the top two destinations for outbound travellers from Dubai. The top destinations for African outbound travellers are listed below:

Asia Pacific

The most searched destinations in the Asia- Pacific region for international travellers are places like Hong Kong and Bangkok. The approaching Chinese New Year will be a good time for the Asia-Pacific travel market. According to the report, the travel searches have increased by about 240%. This number is likely to increase as many travellers will be booking last minute trips. More than 75% of all trips searched are for 4-10 days.

To obtain detailed report of Sojern click here.

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