Bracing for A Return to Travel: How Lionbridge Helped A Tourism Agency Respond to the Effects of COVID-19

• Analytics & Modeling - Predictive Analytics
• Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
• Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration

• Business Operation
• Sales & Marketing

For many European citizens, the arrival of summer means one thing: tourism. But in a world coping with COVID-19, it was also sure to bring new challenges. Those in the tourism industry would be met with unprecedented uncertainties: How many people will be traveling? Where will they be coming from? Where will they be traveling to? What are their safety expectations? How will travel sentiments and expectations vary country-to-country? And most importantly: What are travelers’ main safety concerns? Our client needed a way to assess traveler intentions and expectations in order to communicate safety measures for a multi-need, multilingual audience.

As a major player in the European travel industry, our client is responsible for creating marketing strategies and connecting with tourists around the world. Since 2017, they have partnered with Lionbridge for services in digital marketing, content creation, translation, and copywriting. Together, we have developed a marketing strategy that resonates with nine languages. The client is a long-time partner of Lionbridge and has been working with them to develop a multilingual digital strategy to stay ahead of the curve in the tourism industry.

Where can a company find a place to poll public opinion easily and accurately, for an audience as large as Europe itself? As with many COVID-19 related challenges, the solution was virtual. “Social listening” is a tool for monitoring and measuring trends on social media. And with the increasing popularity of social media as a platform to express opinion and communicate with businesses, there was no better place to assess public sentiment. Lionbridge used social listening to answer our client’s most pressing questions. Our client wanted to know: How we can keep travelers secure when visiting foreign countries? What will the day-to-day experience be for shops and tourist destinations? What is the current public perception around traveling to foreign countries? What is the current conversation on social media? Who are the major social media influencers? Which platforms are most popular for social media influencers? To address these questions for a multilingual, multicultural audience, we used Synthesio, a state-of-art social listening tool. With Synthesio we can track various important trends, including: Social media conversation, Recurrent social themes, Number of mentions, Customer feedback, Customer expectations. Using this data, we compared trends month-to-month, across a range of markets and languages around Europe. Our client was then able to assess the performance of each campaign in every country and determine how to adapt their approach in the future.

• Using social listening and other digital strategies, Lionbridge responded to uncertainty with innovation.
• Our teams succeeded in providing concrete information on traveler behavior during COVID-19.
• Our client was able to adjust their content strategy to deliver tailored, multilingual content and concrete information to their audience.