New App Ignites Bookings for Hotels & Destination Marketing

(Newswire.net — December 14, 2016) Bridgetown, ST. MICHAEL –In its drive to make travel planning relevant, fun and uniquely personal, the Barbados Tourism Encyclopedia has signed on as the first destination marketing organisation in the world to license the PersonaHolidays vacation planner.

PersonaHolidays is a startup venture that already has several companies interested in licensing this AI technology that puts personality into travel. Barbados.org, site of Barbados Tourism Encyclopedia, is the largest destinations marketing website exc;usively covering Barbados holidays and vacation information. It includes all details about the island, travel documents, hotels, festivals, events, attractions and what to expect along with search engines, trip planning and bookings. The site is massive – with over 100,000 pages, images and videos – and is used by several million visitors.

Barbados.org has always had a keen interest in building user-friendly and behavior-responsive systems that understand visitors’ needs and dynamically present relevant information. It has pioneered with features like RealHolidays bookings, bookable-ads and bookable-maps which were commended by Google and featured in the New York Times. Now with PersonaHolidays it takes a leap forward, delivering totally personal holidays with its unique psychology-based intelligent learning system geared to matching travelers with hotels based on personality. See more about how Barbados is using personality to create truly personal holidays for destination marketing.

PersonaHolidays has been developed over several years and includes a large database of users’ experiences and choices that are matched with hotels using persona’s behavior predictive technology. All Barbados hotels have been classified using smart automated systems developed by PersonaHolidays and its partners. Its expert systems that aid in search and planning take customized holidays to a new standard of personalization.

Tests have demonstrated that visitors stay longer on the new channel, they do more and bookings have increased significantly. According to Kathy-Lynn Ward, COO of Barbados.org, “Bookings jumped as much as 500 percent for guests using the Persona Holidays channel to find compatible hotels and book a very personal holiday.”

Travelers especially like how quickly the search and recommendation engine responds to every click. “It immediately builds a travel persona and matches that up with hotels that perfectly align with their personality, and it never overwhelms with too many choices. It recommends just those options that match hotels with the travelers character,” says Ward.

Recommendation engines have been in the news for some time now as more and more travel marketers and tourism professional try to build systems that are more responsive, more relevant and more personal. Much of the effort, however, has been in understanding personalization as making the room the right color. PersonaHolidays is more strategic, looking at psychological attributes of personality that define a travel persona – who they like to be with; are they avant guard, artisans, connoisseurs, independent, social, adventurous? – it matches travel persona to holiday options automatically.  Ward says; “The PersonaHolidays hotel matchmaker works by inference, its Expert AI systems track, analyze and predict behavior, without subjecting travelers to psychological tests and questionnaires.”

Personalization is also understood as adding more human interaction, such as having a travel agent’s help in creating the perfect personal vacation. The fact is, however, that we are in an automated world, where artificial intelligence and expert systems that analyze behavior are the way of the future. The new AI systems typically have access to more information and intelligence than a human counterpart.

Personaholidays AI technology is for tourism destinations using online travel planning and booking services, including hotel chains, hotel associations, destination management organizations and other destination marketers. One of the main features is that it can be implemented without having to  re-engineer or replace existing legacy systems with costly technology.
 
For more information, contact http://contact.personaholidays.com
Press kit http://www.slideshare.net/irclay/personaholidays

A live installation of PersonaHolidays personal recommendation engine that integrates current psychology research into travel may be viewed at the link at the end of this page.