The “digital customer journey” is increasingly becoming a central element in marketing holidays and guest experiences. Developing and maintaining them is one of the important future tasks of every destination. Engadin digital expert Werner Pircher is advising the canton and Engadin St. Moritz Tourismus AG on this.
As in all areas of life, apps, websites and digital tools are also finding their way into leisure and holidays. For a long time now, there has hardly been a hotel that cannot be booked worldwide via an online travel agency, rental bikes or train trips are booked online and the weather and road conditions are constantly available online. “But vacations consist of much more than travel, accommodation and renting sports equipment,” says Werner Pircher from St. Moritzer agency spot advertising, which supports destinations and providers throughout the Alpine region in digitization issues.
“Digitalization gives guests the opportunity to put together their own personal holiday experience when providers partner with a destination and create a comprehensive digital guest experience.” Every guest's digital journey begins with photos, reports or films on the Internet. They are the inspiration to take a closer look at a destination. After visiting a dozen or more websites, a guest usually books their trip and accommodation via an online travel agency. This is where he starts generating data on his vacation behavior. Once there, he then searches for various experiences and books them, often also online, and leaves further data.
“The more vendors in the shop, the better for everyone.”
Digital platforms create profiles of their customers from data. “If we manage to get a guest to complete as many of their bookings as possible via our platforms, we can get to know them better and over time make suggestions that are tailored to them,” explains Pircher. The “Experience Shops” of the Engadin and St. Moritz brands are therefore a central element of the tourism digitization of the Engadin and St. Moritz brands. Here, all suppliers in the region can offer and sell their products online.
The shop is free of charge for providers. In the shops, guests get a quick overview of everything they can book and experience in the Engadin. The more vendors sell their products in the shop, the better for everyone: because the shop registers what a guest is interested in and suggests additional things to them based on their growing profile that they could do. For example, if someone books a children's lesson at a surf school, they could be interested in other family offers or other activities at the lake. However, a well-designed digital guest experience is not an aggressive advertising and sales engine.
Instead, the system weighs up what a guest might like based on many criteria and then suggests it to them. “The guest gets a digital travel companion who takes them to experiences that they might never have discovered alone,” explains Werner Pircher.
For tourism professionals and local providers, guests' data is invaluable, “if they can do anything with it,” says Pircher. The evaluation of large amounts of data is so complex that it simply overwhelms individual providers. “This is a classic future task of a destination organization,” says Pircher. “Individual providers are far too small for that.”
No compromise when it comes to data protection
Where large amounts of data are generated, there is always the question of how to protect this data from misuse. “An extremely important topic!” , confirms Pircher. “We are not making any compromises here. Our data protection is based on the world's strictest guidelines. Our users can decide at any time what can be done with their data and delete their profiles at any time.” The digitization of tourism is a Herculean task involving Engadin St. Moritz Tourism AG attaches great importance.
“Engadin was far behind here for a long time,” says Pircher. “Today, we are already in a good midfield compared to other destinations in the Alps and in a few years we will be one of the leading digital destinations.” The digital customer journey is a long-term destination task that is rapidly evolving, says Pircher. “It is not enough to collect a lot of data with an app. The destination must also be able to do something with the data. But we're on the right track.”
Pircher firmly denies that digital tools will once replace people in tourism: “In essence, tourism has not changed. He thrives on ideas, good craftsmanship and the will to be a good host every day. Our guests come to us to meet other people and experience nature.”
Werner Pircher
(59) is founder and co-owner of the St. Moritz agency Spotwerbung. On behalf of the Canton of Grisons, he works in the “Digital Roadmap Grisons” working group, which supports the digitization of Bünden tourism.
This article was published at the beginning of June 2022 in the newspaper “Giazetta Tuissem”, which is published every six months by Engadin St. Moritz Tourismus AG and distributed in Engadin. Christian Gartmann is responsible for the entire content of this issue.