Persona Holidays Personal Recommendation Engine

• Tourism planning and shopping has not changed in years. OTAs, hotels and wholesalers sell features and amenities all with the same traditional approach. Booking engines are vast, iterative and slow.
• Travelers are overloaded with choice and inundated with information. They visit 20 to 30 site before making a booking. They are frustrated with systems that are impersonal and overwhelming.
  
• Travelers don’t want more choice; they want a personal recommendation by a service they trust and that knows what they want.
  
• This presentation demonstrates Persona Holidays, a new travel expert system that delivers highly personal results at the speed of thought.
  
• View the PDF to explore the ideas and solution
  

Travel is Personal

Persona Holidays Matches You with Hotels and Packages by Personality – Hotel Matchmaker

Travel - Expert Systems - Guests - Hosts - Marketing - Technology - About - Contact

More and more travelers are looking for authentic, personal vacations at a time when most travel planning systems filter options by price, location and amenities. This misses the whole point of being personal. Amenities do not define an authentic, personal vacation experience; people, place and character make the difference. Persona Holidays stands alone creating holidays that match your personality.

PersonaHolidays.com demonstrates that it knows YOU and it finds a hotel and vacation package that is the perfect fit for your personality. Of course, you still get to choose amenities and get the best value. However, personality offers a unique perspective that can make a holiday entirely your own - Exclusively yours.

For the hotel and tourism hosts, personality and character are a vital differentiation at a time when it is feared that travel is becoming a mere commodity in the online distribution systems. Hoteliers want to increase their distribution intelligently and maintain their brand integrity so that they are not just selling hotel rooms as a lowest-price commodity. They are seriously looking for an alternative that will build, maintain and feature their unique brand identity. Commodities look, feel and taste the same, but personality is always unique.

That is why we built PersonaHolidays Personal Recommendation Engine for Travel!

Persona Holidays Expert System

PersonaHolidays.com is a personalized travel planning experience that matches travelers to hotels and activities based on character.

It is an Expert System that analyses behavior and delivers experiences according to personality matches. That is, it gets to know the personal characteristics of visitors discreetly, without being obtrusive. The system learns with each user click and it pairs visitors up with hotels of like character.

It is a unique intelligent system that extracts relevant information about character based on user behavior and available data.

Persona Holidays creates guest profiles quietly. It does not pry or ask questions or conduct surveys; it simply learns from experience. In the process it builds an integrated database of a guest's personal triggers and instantly matches these with hotels and activities of complementary characteristics. In this sense it is a Hotel Matchmaker. It uses tried and proven technology we developed for RealhHolidays way back at the dawn of the booking engine era.

Live hotel search with persona expert systems http://search.personaholidays.com

Guests Perspective

This example shows the relationship between the hotel and guest matching. The hotel in this case is categorized with the Connoisseur Identity (on the right). The process of creating the unique hotel brand identity is described below in the Hotels Perspective.

The system assigns triggers to guests based on what they do, what they look at, what they dismiss and what they like. In this case, the particular traveler is assigned the characteristics above, i.e. charming, educated, savvy, etc. The hotels that best match these triggers are simultaneously selected as possible candidates. Guests can review their profile and change it at anytime. They may choose to look at different profiles and also modify these to suit. The character traits are refined as the guest proceeds and the matching principles are constantly adjusted based on real-time experience.

Hotels are given a brand ID and a set of triggers similar to the above. In this case, the ID that most closely matches the guest's behavior is "The Connoisseur". The expert system will present the guest with the closest match. In most cases, it will select 3 properties in the category - a High-End, a Mid-Range and a Budget accommodation are the default options for a personality match.

The majority of guests have indicated that the matching and profiling are very helpful. Some have commented that: “This system knows me better that I know myself”.

When trialed on the barbados.org website, engagement went up 500% over traditional bookings.

All hotels, attractions and activity providers are individually evaluated by the Persona Holidays team. The hotel will need to complete an online survey that asks specific situational question. These questions are interwoven to detect subtle personality drivers that define the main personality archetypes.

The survey takes just a few minutes to create a very focused identity based on communication style and branding. Further analysis of the brand values are also possible but we find that the host identity is sufficient in most cases. The Persona Systems team then extracts traveler-specific details and creates the property matching criteria.