Creating effective user personas for the evolving travel market

Amadeus’ technology powers the global travel and tourism industry. They deliver innovative solutions that address the needs and expectations of travellers, as well as the challenges and opportunities of the travel industry. The Covid pandemic and near shutdown of the travel industry resulted in many changes, some of which were temporary, but many are here to stay, and the landscape has changed permanently.

Amadeus’ customers and users include travel agencies, travel consultants and the end travelers themselves. This project focused specifically on the agencies and travel consultants, collectively called “travel sellers”, and centred around how Selling Platform Connect, their web-based booking and fulfilment platform, fits within the new ecosystem of tools and ways of working.

What our client wanted

The project sought to bridge gaps in user insight including;

• Conduct research to ensure Amadeus’ travel consultant personas were up to date and accurately reflected the current user base and their working environment. Bringing insight to everyone, not just those in customer facing roles. Not everyone working on the products has the luxury of access to end-users, so user research findings and personas were key to communicating user needs and behaviours internally.

• Talking to a diverse set of agencies, consultants and roles from a world-wide sample. Agencies can adapt Selling Platform Connect to their precise requirements and because the platform is as individual as each travel business, it was important to capture this variety in the research.

• Using research insights to update the Travel Consultant personas and identify new or emerging personas and providing branded deliverables ready to share and use with internal stakeholders.

What we delivered

We kicked off with a collaborative workshop session to review existing personas with stakeholders from across the business. We wanted to understand how they are currently used, where there are gaps and outstanding questions about their customers, and their hopes for new and updated personas.

Our approach to gathering research insight involved one-to-one interviews focusing on users’ relationships with Amadeus, their specific interactions along the customer journey and their experience using their products. We developed a session guide to address these questions along with proposed measures and areas to include in each persona, to ensure we captured all the data we needed in the sessions.

System Concepts supported Amadeus in the recruitment of end customers via intercept surveys and Amadeus customer partnerships and conducted remote research sessions with travel consultants from around the world ranging from small independent agencies to consultants working in departments of larger travel agencies.

We gathered a huge amount of data which we captured in an online workspace using the tool Miro. We conducted careful analysis of the insight to identify the personas, develop the content and design an engaging presentation of the information.

The results

The success of the project can be measured in a number of positive outcomes, including:

• 3 personas emerged from the sample of users we spoke to, with a hypothesis for a further persona to research in the next iteration of research as we continue to build a better picture of customer needs and experiences.

• The team now has access to up-to-date insight shaped by real-world experiences of users and customers, bringing understanding of how they use Amadeus products in conjunction with other tools to build a picture of the ecosystem at play.

• The insight covers key priority areas for the team, including the persona’s relationship with technology, roles and responsibilities, tools, priorities, goals and targets, frustrations, approach to bookings, their typical day, and their communication approach and strategies with clients, colleagues and other organisations.

• Anecdotal insight about changes following the global pandemic has now been backed up by research, including understanding the impact of changes such as more remote working, restructured teams, loss of experienced travel agents, increased online presence, new positions being filled with more novice users, and the emergence of more independent or smaller agencies.

• This is all invaluable information and insight to have at their fingertips to help answer questions about their customers and steer decision making, as well as up-to-date resources they can share and seed across the company.

The client’s experience. What was it like to work with us:

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