Boosting bookings with personalized vacation suggestions

Challenge: Inspire adventures and bookings

Imagine you’re inside on a rainy day, scrolling through social media on your phone. In between the usual snaps of your friends and family, something stops you in your tracks: a photo of a gorgeous beach, the sun beating down on pure white sands and the deep blue sea. You check the location tag — Ios, a Greek island in the Aegean Sea — and make a mental note. You just found your next vacation destination.

“We believe there’s a strong opportunity to use quality content on social media to inspire and inform the decision-making process, and help travelers find their perfect destination,” says Matteo De Santis, Head of Business Development at Vivere.travel. “People are inspired by the photos they see on social media and on the web, which makes them want to go and experience those places for themselves.”

Vivere.travel, a digital destination discovery platform, believes that nothing has the power to influence vacation plans like beautifully curated, personalized content.

De Santis explains: “Vivere.travel is a predominantly visual experience. Using our online platform, customers enter information about their interests, planned dates of travel and budgets, and we present stunning photos and videos of destinations that match their unique preferences. Our aim is to help customers find and book the destinations and hotels that attract them most. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words.

“We work with freelance creatives to produce high-quality imagery and other content. What we lacked was an efficient, intelligent way of managing it all — particularly as the amount of content keeps growing as we expand and add more destinations to the platform. We knew it would get to the point where we would no longer be able to manage and tag content manually.

“To enable our customers to find exactly what they’re looking for, we wanted a way to aggregate, organize and tag a massive amount of visual and non-visual content as efficiently and intelligently as possible.”

Solution: A powerful repository for content

To help deliver personalized content to customers, Vivere.travel selected Acoustic Content (formerly Content Hub) as the foundation of its service.

Giacomo Lanza, Lead Web Developer at Vivere.travel, recalls: “What initially attracted us to Content is the fact that it’s a headless content management system — a backend only. This means that we have much greater flexibility in developing the web-based, front-end user interface compared to traditional, all-in-one content management systems. We can take our website down to work on upgrades without affecting Content, meaning that the content team can continue their work uninterrupted.

“We were also very impressed with the documentation of the API — the level of detail is fantastic. There are step-by-step instructions on how to create application packages, and we’ve found the information to be both comprehensive and reliable. This has made life so much easier for developers currently working on the second release of the platform.

“What’s more, support from the Acoustic team has been excellent. They’re very happy to help us with any questions we have, and we always receive a prompt reply.”

With Content, Vivere.travel gained a central repository for all its content — including images, video and text — that is priced per amount of content stored, not per user.

De Santis comments: “All our personnel can access the content they need, when they need it — without driving up our costs. This collaboration is particularly important as we work on the second release of our platform. Having a single, central system for storing and managing content has been a real game-changer.”

Results: Highly personalized content that boosts engagement

Currently working on the development of the second version of the Vivere.travel website, the company is keen to take full advantage of Content’s artificial intelligence capabilities as soon as possible.

Lanza remarks: “We can already see how powerful a tool Content is, but know that it has so much more to offer. Content will use visual recognition to analyze images for scenes, objects, colors, and more, and automatically tag the images with easily searchable classifiers. We expect this to save us a great deal of time and effort in the future. Currently, we still rely on our content team to tag images manually — but as the number of destinations available on our platform continues to grow, we know that this is unsustainable. With automated, artificial intelligence for image tagging, Content will enable us to keep expanding our platform without increasing our headcount.”

De Santis adds: “Crucially, intelligent image tagging will make it quicker and easier to search for relevant content about specific locations, and improve our ability to push out personalized content to our customers. The more specifically we can curate content for individual travelers, and the more personal and engaging we can make the experience, the more likely we are to grow our customer base and drive vacation bookings through the platform. And by collecting more customer behavior data, we increase our opportunities to improve the accuracy of our personalization algorithm — improving the platform and the customer experience.”

With Content in place, Vivere.travel expects to provide a more responsive, personal digital experience to travelers.

De Santis concludes: “Supported by Acoustic technology, we are confident that we will be able to deliver exquisitely curated content that appeals to every kind of traveler, and change the way that people plan and book vacations for the better.”

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