In today’s globalized travel industry, exceeding customer expectations is paramount for companies that aim to deliver exceptional customer experiences. As a travel professional, you understand the significance of catering to diverse audiences and adapting your services to different cultures and languages. Localization plays a crucial role in bridging the communication gap and enhancing every aspect of the travel journey.
When you embrace a localization strategy, you unlock the full potential for personalized travel experiences with seamless communication, cultural immersion, and easy access to accurate information.
What is localization?
Localization is the process of adapting content, products, and services to a specific target market or locale. It goes far beyond translating from one language to another, taking into account cultural, linguistic, and contextual aspects to ensure content resonates with the audience.
The localization process involves the optimization of various elements such as:
- Language
- Currency
- Units of measurement
- Date and time format
- Images and colors
- Cultural references
The goal is to create content that is relevant and appropriate for your audience to enhance the user experience.
The Importance of Localization in the Travel Industry
In the context of the travel industry, localization plays a crucial role in providing tailored experiences to travelers outside of your local market. It involves translating and adapting digital marketing materials, websites, social media, mobile apps, customer support, and other communication channels to the local language, taking into account the cultural nuances of your audience.
For example, Anuvu used localization to improve in-flight translation quality for over 65 airlines. By automating and simplifying the translation process to their global audience, Anuvu was able to meet the distinct requirements of each airline without impacting delivery. Standardizing instructions and transforming GUI text resulted in faster, scalable service. Anuvu now benefits from an efficient onboarding process, a 20% reduction in turnaround time, and a 99% adoption rate across all airlines.
By implementing localization, you can effectively communicate with your customers, provide relevant information, recommendations, support, and create a more immersive and engaging experience — it’s a required element of effective modern global marketing.
Recommended: Free eBook: How to Translate the Customer Journey at Every Touchpoint
Personalized travel experiences
One of the primary expectations of travelers is a personalized travel experience. You can leverage localization to tailor your offer to specific customer segments, providing relevant recommendations and personalized communication. By understanding the local customs, preferences, and interests of your target audience, you can curate experiences that feel tailor-made for each traveler.
Cultural immersion and authenticity
Travelers often seek cultural immersion and authentic experiences when exploring new destinations. Localization allows you to capture the essence of the local culture to showcase in your marketing materials and content. Localization is a necessary element in streamlined language operations — when you translate and adapt your messaging, you can connect with travelers on a deeper level and offer a genuine and immersive experience.
Seamless communication and support
Effective communication is key to ensuring a smooth travel experience. Localization enables you to overcome language barriers and facilitate clear communication with your customers, helping you to increase your customer satisfaction scores, even during travel surges.
Whether it’s translating website content, providing multilingual customer support, or offering real-time language assistance through mobile apps, localization helps foster seamless communication throughout the entire customer journey allowing you to build a sustainable, scalable customer support strategy.
Expanding into new markets
Localization also opens doors to new markets for travel companies. By adapting your marketing campaigns, website, and customer support to different languages and cultures, you can expand into entirely new regions. This expansion not only increases revenue opportunities but also allows you to diversify your customer base and strengthen your global presence.
Unbabel’s solutions for successful localization
Unbabel offers innovative solutions to address the challenges of localization in the travel industry. Leveraging state-of-the-art, AI-enabled machine translation capabilities and a vast network of professional translators, Unbabel ensures accurate and culturally nuanced translations.
Our translation management system (TMS) streamlines the localization workflow, enabling seamless collaboration between you and your localization teams. It enables you to implement transcreation so you can adapt your content from one language to another without losing your tone, intent, or style.
With our quality intelligence (Qi) report, you can instantly evaluate your translation quality and prioritize data protection to provide a secure experience for your customers.
Accor Live Limitless collaborated with Unbabel to achieve a seamless platform-to-platform content exchange. Unbabel’s translation services and custom integration to Accor’s app platform enabled the translation of over 500,000 words across three significant projects. With tailored translation teams and the use of Translation Memory, Unbabel delivered high-quality translations and reduced costs, even for languages like Japanese and Simplified Chinese.
Within six weeks, the integration eliminated manual handling and updated language versions in 110 different countries. Accor’s offline review functionality allowed for easy implementation of amendments.
Unbabel’s recent acquisition of Bablic has enhanced our website localization and translation capabilities, empowering travel companies to provide exceptional localized content and elevate customer satisfaction.
Unlock the power of localization to level up your customer satisfaction
Localization is not just a buzzword; it is an essential strategy for travel companies aiming to meet the high expectations of travelers. By embracing localization, companies can deliver personalized experiences, foster cultural immersion, ensure effective communication, and expand their reach into new markets. Unbabel offers comprehensive solutions that combine cutting-edge technology, linguistic expertise, and a deep understanding of the travel industry.
By leveraging Unbabel’s localization services, you can provide exceptional customer experiences, increase customer satisfaction scores, and establish yourself as leaders in the global travel market.
To witness the impact of localization firsthand, request an Unbabel demo today.
