Virtual Merchandising: Is it Akin to ABS, and Why Do You Absolutely Need It?

What if as a hotel seller you wouldn't need cooperation from a hotel or even a wholesaler to achieve a more sophisticated buyer experience? In a quest to provide OTAs and booking engines with upselling capabilities, this is what we at Gimmonix dubbed Virtual Merchandising.

What is Virtual Merchandising?

Virtual merchandising is the deconstruction and reconstruction of the aggregate of your room offerings in a particular hotel to give consumers the ability to work their way up to their desired room offering, and/or expand on it after they book.

In the following example, a sophisticated business logic structure recognizes a room offering out of a set of attributes a customer picked. The user experience is personalized while the outcome still uses an existing bank of room offerings.

The Technology Behind It

The idea is quite simple but requires a bit of technological prowess. Using superior, AI-driven room-mapping capabilities it is now possible to map, group and extract the attributes of millions of rooms in millions of hotels across several suppliers.

Customer centricity, the likes of which can be achieved with virtual merchandising, is a significant step towards what we at Gimmonix believe is the future of a consumer-centric approach in a rehabilitated travel industry. It is, we believe, a call for OTAs and other travel businesses to stop making their customers work so hard.

Virtual Merchandising vs. ABS: A Marketing Strategy Comparison

Marketers, business, and product professionals have long advocated for mapping user experiences and increasing touchpoint effectiveness along the user journey. Virtual merchandising may not supply the traditional experience of ABS as it is known in the airline industry from an operational standpoint. However, as a sales and marketing touchpoint enhancement strategy, it can very well achieve the same results.

Let's take a look at the various touch points we can optimize along the customer journey:

Entry-Level Pricing & Personalization

Much like in the airline industry, you can now present a 'basic' room offering that a user can expand on (see the following example that shows a 'basic' hotel room with selectable attributes).

The benefits are twofold:

• From a user's perspective: You're providing a perceived lower entry-level pricing and a personalized experience
• From your perspective: You drive conversion and retention

Automated Upselling

In the following example, the virtual merchandising business logic has extracted the remaining attributes possible to be upsold from the bank of available offerings and designed an automated sales offering that contains additional available meal plans and room classes.

Room-Centric Search Approach

Superior mapping technology allows introducing a room-centric search approach; in other words, you can flip the search experience so that your end customers can pick and choose exactly what they're looking for (at the beginning of their journey) without going through searching and refiltering properties.

Put another way, after stating their wishes, consumers get right to the end product: hotel rooms matching the desired criteria, right off the bat, nested under their respective hotels as shown in the following figure.

This approach attains two important objectives:

1. It personalizes the search experience
2. It eliminates as many as three extra steps to conversion

Why You Need Virtual Merchandising

Virtual merchandising represents a fundamental shift in how travel companies can approach hotel room sales:

• Independence: No need for cooperation from hotels or wholesalers to create sophisticated buyer experiences
• Personalization: Customers can build their ideal room offering step by step
• Conversion optimization: Lower perceived entry prices combined with personalized upselling
• Efficiency: Automated business logic handles the complex matching and upselling
• Customer-centric approach: Reduces friction and work for the customer throughout their journey

By leveraging AI-driven room mapping technology, virtual merchandising enables travel companies to unlock new revenue opportunities while simultaneously improving the customer experience—a true win-win scenario in the competitive travel landscape.

To learn about Gimmonix's services – info@gimmonix.com