Written by : Rashmi Singh
Travellers have packed their bags and are ready to discover new destinations. During their adventures, they will need guidance and information from travel websites. But the question is – are travel websites ready to give the best experience to their users?
For a long time, travel websites relied mostly on the text and picture-based media to serve content to their users. But now is the perfect time to upgrade the publication and launch your own app.
Down below is a list of some reasons why you should create your own travel app:
Increase Stickiness with Interactive Content
The content on websites is mostly limited to text, images, and videos. Although images and videos might make an article more appealing, they do not entail interactiveness. On the other hand, apps give the optionality of adding interactive content such as tappable stories.
The key benefit of serving interactive content is high user engagement. Millennials and GenZ – who are a significant proportion of the travelling website audience – prefer interactive content over conventional articles.
Own Your Audience
There is a famous phrase in the marketing world: out of sight, out of mind. This holds true for every type of media website including travel websites. If an internet user visits your website once, there is no guarantee that they will visit your website again. However, this problem can be solved with an app.
Once users install your app on their device, they will open the app every once in a while. This means that you essentially own your audience unless they actively choose to uninstall the app on their phones.
Serve Relevant Content
With the help of telemetry data collected from your app, you can know whether your users are travelling or not. This data can help you in serving relevant content catered to individual users. Not only does relevant content makes the user experience better, but it also helps you generate more revenue through targeted ads.
Increase Engagement with Notifications
Serving interactive content is one way to increase the engagement of your users. But even interactive content falls short when users forget the website they visited the last time. This is where notifications come into play.
You can keep your users coming back to the app by sending notifications. In fact, there are many tried-and-tested notifications that get high engagement, such as deals and discounts notifications.
Get Additonal Traffic
The biggest app stores like Google Play Store and Apple app store, get hundreds of millions of searches every month. Out of this number, a small percentage is that of travel apps. The good news – even a small percentage translates to millions of searches a month.
Websites can get traffic only from search engines like Google and Binge. But if you want additional traffic from app stores, you should consider launching your own app. You can use solutions like react native apps that would help you have your app up and running in a matter of days!
Get Better Insights
There are multiple benefits of data-driven publishing such as understanding the average user behaviour, funnel optimization, and better editorial decision-making. Although you can collect user data with your website, apps are considered much better for collecting first-party user data.
Travel App Publishing with Headless CMS
Many travel websites refrain from creating their own app because they assume running an app along with a website is a cumbersome task. But publishing simultaneously on your app and website becomes easy when you use a headless CMS. Instead of publishing content on individual channels, you can simply use a headless CMS and deliver content across all channels.
Keeping the need of publishers in mind, we have developed the ‘Bold’ CMS. It is a headless CMS that helps travel website publishers in creating, curating, and distributing content without any effort. Click here to know more about how Bold can help you run your travel website and app.