Whether you are a hotel, airline, meta search player or online travel agent, if you want to drive loyalty you need to give your customers what they want.

With access to data, it’s much easier to know how to build your business. That’s the case for Homestay, a relatively new player up in the fast-growing holiday rentals market. In the past year, Homestay has signed up 30,000 hosts and now has a footprint in 100 countries.

This has been driven in part by word of mouth, but also by putting some spend against multiple platforms – not least into Google! With 50,000 Facebook followers, Homestay is building a community of followers in what chief executive Alan Clarke, chief executive of Homestay, believes to be a market of between 7-14 billion.

Like Airbnb, Homestay is banking on the fact that travellers want a local experience, but where the Dublin headquartered firm differentiates is that the host is always present. That helps mitigate against some of the legal issues that Airbnb has faced. A recent ruling states that if the host isn’t present, guests are limited to a 90-day stay.

Getting closer to the customer

What’s clear is that when it comes to capturing the customer at all stages of the customer journey, there is still everything to play for. Clear indicators of are the moves of the big boys; think Booking.com’s acquisition of OpenTable and TripAdvisor’s of tours and reservations specialist Viator. Booking.com has already moved into the home rentals space so it isn’t conceivable that Homestay could add another dimension to this. Clarke won’t rule this out, nor other synergistic partnerships, but he says the firm needs to build inventory first. It’s doing that by focusing on data. 

This, he says, gives Homestay has a much clearer understanding of what customers – the host and ‘home stayer’ - are looking for. “Earning an income or saving money on a stay is an important reason for offering a home stay, but it’s not the standout one. There is also definitely an appetite to meet new people,” says Clarke.

Here are a just handful of examples of what the firm’s data analysis has revealed:

• 72% hosts want to make a bit of extra cash
• 79% also enjoy having guests stay
• 60% of guests and hosts enjoy sharing interests with people from other parts of the world
• 95% of bookings close within 36 hours.

With that level of insight, Homestay is in a much better position to improve performance. Crucial to the Homestay offering is the profile that appears on the site of both guest and host, and of course reviews. Reviews give the firm a clear understanding of what guests are looking for from hosts.

“If you’re going to be having breakfast with somebody for a few months, that’s really important,” says Clarke.

Perfecting the product

If you don’t have a product people want, then you don’t have a business. Period. This is something Edinburgh-based Skyscanner, which has now been around over ten years, understands only too well. According to Skyscanner’s senior data analyst Ewan Nicolson ongoing fine-tuning of the product, based on customer learning, is something that all firms need to do. “Because consumer behaviour is changing so rapidly we have to keep an open mind to ensure that we are helping new customers do what they want to do,” he says. At Skyscanner, data is also being used to help people internally do their jobs better.

While the fact that everybody is different may be stating the obvious, access to customer data can help firms make the product more personal – something few, if any, have cracked. As a young company, it is still early days for Homestay and one of recent push is to create different categories of selection to acknowledge that while some people may want a host to go with to the pub every night, others just want nice accommodation in a good location. On the other hand, some may want value for money, but place equal importance on meeting new people, improving a language skill or having a local experience. “We’re still working out what those categories might be,” he says. What Homestay has also recognised is that communication prior to booking is crucial and this is something they are working to make easier through instant messages, video chat and so on.

Whether you’re using data to remove friction in the booking process, or to help operational teams make business decisions, data is crucial. Of course this is not new to the airlines which have long had vast quantities of data to deal with, says Justin De Vries, Loyalty & Product Analytics Manager at Hawaiian Airlines, a predominantly leisure carrier. However, he is quick to add that today’s data driven world is an entirely different one.

What he has found is that large quantities of data are not necessarily helpful. What matters is an organisation’s ability to piece together the small data and then put in place the technology to analyse larger chunks of data, and present it in a way that everybody understands.

With a growing focus on driving loyalty through various programmes, De Vries knows that this begins with customer understanding. A primary focus is using data to establish which customer segments, wish to purchase which products, and how they want to receive those offers. Of course, the key to loyalty is meeting your customer in every channel they wish to see you in.

In Hawaiian’s case email marketing is a still the favourite channel. But, as Nicolson stresses, it’s absolutely crucial not to bombard customers with spam-like email, or for that matter compromise their privacy or security, because that will only serve to destroy trust.

With the right approach to data, travel brands could open floodgates of new customers, but there is a clear need for gatekeepers too.