Seera Group, the region’s leading travel services company, has launched a new data portal for industry partners, which offers comprehensive insights on future searches, bookings and traveller behaviour. The portal has been designed to enable tourism boards and other industry partners to further understand the customer journey at every touchpoint and make projections for strategic campaigns.
In an attempt to support the wider travel ecosystem during the recovery phase of travel, Seera Group is working closely with partners globally to identify the most valuable data sets to tailor the platform and whitelabel it according to their needs. Phase one of the portal roll-out will focus on tourism board partners, with data delivered by Seera Group’s flagship consumer travel brand Almosafer – the leading omnichannel travel brand in KSA.
With VisitBritain as a launch partner, Seera is looking to further strengthen the Group’s partnership with the National Tourism Board of Britain which has focused on boosting the tourism sector by positioning the country as a destination of choice for Saudi visitors.
Almosafer’s recent insights show that the number of flights booked from KSA to the UK has doubled from 2018 to 2019. Furthermore, Almosafer saw an increase of 19% percent in hotel bookings by Saudi travellers to the UK in 2019 as compared to the year before. London, Manchester and Birmingham maintained their position as top three destinations in the UK since 2018 KSA travellers.
The new portal, developed by Seera Group’s data and analytics team, enables VisitBritain to access powerful data sets and projections on business outcomes. Insights will be provided on target destinations, as well as details such as preferred travel dates, length of stay, booking windows, cities of preference, accommodation and airline preferences and other real-time statistics that will help VisitBritain in making informed decisions and driving forward-planning. The portal also provides insights on traveller behaviour during the COVID-19 era including search trends as well as data from the interaction with health and safety related information available on consumer platforms.
Louise Blake, VP of Data and Analytics at Seera Group, said: “These insights will enable a deeper understanding of the target audience and behaviours, helping our partners deliver further value. Through this portal, traveller preferences and activities can be tracked by VisitBritain, which will help them to foster a deeper experience for the guests by providing an enhanced personalised journey.”
Sofia Santos, Country Manager GCC for VisitBritain, said: “Tourism is also an extremely competitive global industry and initiatives such as Seera’s innovative insights portal, supporting us to access real-time data on travellers’ preferences and future booking patterns, will help to position Britain as the destination of choice for visitors from Saudi Arabia when the time comes to promote travel once more working with strategic partners across the region.”
Partners can access data on Seera Insights such as competitor performance, reviews, social graphs, differential guest value, and preferred destinations that can help develop optimal strategies for both the traveller and the business.
In the second phase of the Seera Insights project, the platform will evolve to include data insights from other verticals of the Group, including Corporate & Government travel management insights via elaa, as well as car rental data through Seera’s brand Lumi and in future, more data sets from Seera’s Hajj & Umrah travel brand Mawasim and its KSA Destination Management Company Discover Saudi – which will be made accessible to partners across the ecosystem including hotel chains and airlines.
Abdullah Aldawood, CEO of Seera Group added: “During these times, where the travel sector has faced an unprecedented level of impact due to COVID-19, it is more important than ever that industry partners come together to support each other and create an enhanced experience for travellers. We’re delighted to strengthen our association with VisitBritain, which will support its goal in positioning Britain as a destination of choice for the region’s travellers. It will be of tremendous value, especially as travel returns to normalcy, and travellers will invariably have new preferences in terms of how and where they travel to, stay and spend their time. Seera Insights is a data-driven value-add for our industry partners helping them to understand the Saudi traveller in granular detail.”
As MENA’s largest homegrown travel company, Seera manages cutting-edge omnichannel consumer online travel platforms on app, mobile and web as well as retail travel agencies across the Kingdom. Seera is also the largest corporate and government travel services provider in Saudi Arabia.