Travel marketers need to ‘shut up and listen’ warns Flight Centre’s head of CRM
Marketers are not doing enough to help brands listen to their customers and understand what they really want, Flight Centre’s head of CRM, loyalty and partnerships has told an audience of Australia’s top travel executives.
Kaye Fallick, Kristy Bloor, Jeremy Medina and Katrina McCarter
Speaking at Mumbrella’s Travel Marketing Summit, Jeremy Medina said marketers were not taking enough time to listen to what customers were telling them.
“Without training people in a lot of empathy and listening for need – and certainly that’s what we miss – and what we’re working towards is shut up and listen,” Medina said.
“Because listening and asking the right questions and forming the key components to those questions will help you ultimately lead [customers] down a path to meet the need, so they are going to be more satisfied with what you are providing to them.
“You will then hopefully have been easier to work with and the experience is then positive, and they will continue to come back to you.”
The industry was told it also needs to listen more to the baby boomer generation and what its needs are.
Kaye Fallick, publisher of YourLifeChoices, warned, travel marketers should focus on finding real influencers for the boomer bracket.
“I really do believe in [being] age-neutral and talking about the product and not the old person who might want it or might not want it. We want to see some more people of that age with diversity,” Fallick said.
“Who are the influencers? When you look on Instagram or you hear about earned advertising from an influencer who does paid product placement, where are the influencers who are 55 and 60 and 65?
“There’s a whole bunch of people like that, male and female, who could be front and centre of campaigns, real people who do this travel and share the good, the bad and the ugly.
“We are adult enough to be told that trip was great but this didn’t work and that went wrong, because that’s what travel is about,” Fallick said.
Abigail Dawson was Mumbrella's senior content journalist covering event content. She left Mumbrella to move into an agency role in 2020.
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