5 Data Enrichment Tips to Win More Bookings on Your Travel Marketplace

Property and accommodation data

This covers every single detail about the hotel that will help a traveller understand if the hotel fits their requirement. Basic data like location, hotel name, room types, availability, bed size and other such details must be listed accurately.

Apart from these other basic amenities like pool, Wi-Fi, room rates, seasonal pricing, photos, videos and tours must also be a part of the data listed on your platform. Often, many take a decision based on the reviews and ratings and look for them to make the final call.

Platforms like Airbnb rely heavily on detailed property descriptions, reviews, amenity tagging, and visual content to help travellers evaluate stays quickly.

And lastly, the most important, the policies, check-in/out, cancellation, refund rules and any other such information are important for anybody to select your hotel. Ensure that each field is machine -readable and easily accessible.

Transport and logistics data

This covers any information that is needed to plan travel, like how one reaches the hotel, how they commute in the city and how well the hotel is connected to airports or railway stations.

It includes connectivity details, transfer options, local transport, logistic support like parking availability, valet service and other such requirements. This data supports easy navigation and directly impacts booking decisions. This data is often missing on most platforms and requires enrichment from secondary sources.

Destination and cultural data

This includes seasonal activities, local events, festivals, heritage sites and any such activities or locations that would interest a tourist. Often, a location is selected based on the cultural activities around the city and locations for sightseeing.

This data inspires a tourist to visit the place, explaining to them what they will experience beyond their stay. It creates an appeal for the tourist to visit the place. Most travellers search for this, and often this is found missing in many travel portals.

This needs urgent attention and must be updated with high accuracy and appeal. Some even go a step further and talk about safety issues while roaming the city and how safe it is for women, especially solo travellers.

Pricing and rate intelligence

These are extremely important to be listed clearly with high accuracy, which, of course, most of the portals do. But they don’t go beyond rack rates, while a traveller needs to compare the rates.

The pricing data must include competitor rates, seasonal rate curves, early bird discounts, last-minute deal flags and any such information that hits the pricing and pocket of the traveller. There should not be any hidden pricing, and it should not take the traveller by surprise.

If your hotel has any loyalty program or any package, mention them clearly. Any small print conditions can spoil the reputation of your hotel.

Review and user-generated content (UGC)

These play an important role in building trust, credibility and influence on booking decisions. It is the real feedback shared by past travellers and helps finalise the booking. Platforms like Tripadvisor built their entire ecosystem around traveller reviews and user-generated content that influence booking decisions.

Include reviews and ratings on your services and the experience of your past guests. Go into detail and add reviews on cleanliness, staff behaviour, location accuracy and anything that made your guests happy. This will reduce decision anxiety and strongly influence booking.

And always structure and tag review data into specific, searchable attributes instead of leaving them as raw text. Tag them by theme, sentiments or filterable insights.

Fragmented supplier data

Any inconsistency in the data can lead to wrong search results and then missed bookings. For example, if you want to mention ‘swimming pool’ as an amenity, then you must ensure that it is stated in the same way across different data sources.

If different sources mention the same amenity in different ways, as some call it ‘swimming pool’ while others call it ‘outdoor pool’, the system may get confused. Though humans would understand the machines may not, and for a filter for ‘pool’, the property might not show up at all. Without normalisation and standardisation, that property fails to match filtered searches.

Untagged visual assets

You may have the best pictures on your platform, but what use is it if they don’t show up in search results? Images uploaded without tags cannot be traced by search algorithms and cannot support conversions.

High-quality visuals increase engagement significantly, and most travellers want to see property visuals before booking. Ensure that you tag your photos so that the machine understands and shows up in search filters.

Stale enrichment cycles

Most of the travel data changes very fast, like flight schedules, price shifts, closed for renovation and other such things that make data stale. The data needs to be updated regularly, and if possible, real-time updates are the best.

Portals running on monthly or quarterly enrichment cycles often end up with wrong data, and the traveller loses trust in the portal. Imagine a person making a booking with the wrong data, only to realise later that the amenities he filtered were not available.

Thin traveler profiles

To personalise results on your portal, it is important to capture the traveller profile, which most of the OTAs miss. One needs to capture behaviour like past searches, budget, preferred filters, or trip type to customise the offerings.

After all, you don’t want a honeymoon couple and a person looking to book a corporate event to see the same options.

All these issues can be fixed if you follow a structured enrichment approach.

Make local events and cultural data structured and searchable

The local events and cultural data are not just for engagement. The real purpose is to get bookings and not to just inspire the travellers. If your data stays, there as static content, it will be of no use to the travellers. The data must be tagged properly so that it is easily filterable and drives discovery and finally booking.

Every detail about the event must be presented in a structured manner. It should be divided into categories like event type, date, duration, location and even audience type. It must also clarify whether it is for family, nightlife or a cultural event.

For example, the Pushkar fair could be tagged as seasonal, Rajasthan or November, while the Goa carnival is tagged as nightlife and near beaches. This helps travellers plan trips better. They could filter hotels near the event or even decide on the time to visit the location.

Such kind of information and tagging improve discoverability and help plan the travel. To improve the engagement further, one could even personalise the page by matching profiles with interests. A person more for adventure could be shown more trekking events, while a couple could be shown cultural events.

Apply structured metadata standards to all image and video assets

You may have hundreds of photos and videos on your portal, but if they are not tagged it may not be searchable. It will just stay there in your OTA and will never appear in any filter or search.

Without structured metadata, the platforms become difficult to navigate and are abandoned fast. It leads to poor search visibility, wrong matches, lower engagement and lost bookings. You need to take steps to ensure your visuals are searchable.

So, what do you need to do? Begin by deciding what information every visual should carry. Every image or video should be labelled clearly with property ID, image type, amenity, location and keywords, to name a few. Any tag that helps the user filter easily.

Be consistent in naming and categories and use one format. A swimming pool should not be defined any other way. Always use ‘swimming pool’ and not ‘pool’, ‘outdoor pool’ or in any other way. It is always a good idea to add metadata while uploading images and videos with dropdowns or predefined fields instead of free text. This ensures consistency and quick tagging.

And most important for large-scale tagging use is AI-enabled automation. AI can detect amenities from images, while NLP helps extract tags from descriptions and reviews. If the supplier API is used, always normalise data so that filters work efficiently. Using metadata the right way drives bookings.

And lastly, data needs constant enrichment, so keep adding missing tags, update info and keep improving based on user behaviour.

Enrich pricing records beyond rack rates to power comparison and personalisation

Just listing price may not work even if the price is attractive unless the traveller can compare the rates across different hotels. It is not only the price they are looking at; they need value for money.

Once travellers complete their research across multiple sites and compare prices, they proceed to make a booking. Bookings do not always happen at the cheapest location, but where pricing is easy to understand.

OTAs such as Expedia Group and Booking.com continuously optimise pricing visibility, loyalty discounts, and comparison features to improve conversions.

That happens when pricing data is enriched with contextual information. Enrich the pricing data by adding competitor benchmarks where the price compares with similar properties. Add seasonal trends, deals, loyalty pricing and any other point that adds more to the pricing than just a number.

This helps users compare and make an informed decision. It builds trust, transparency reducing any kind of ambiguity or confusion. This further helps in customisation; for example, for a price-sensitive customer, deals and discounts can be made more visible, while a premium customer can see value-added packages.

Extract and structure travel trend signals from social and behavioural data sources

Social listening is very important to capture trends that tell you what travellers are likely to explore next. This data must be captured from multiple sources scattered all over, like travel blogs, social media, reviews or even user behaviour on your platform.

You need to get into the skin of travellers to understand what is getting popular with different age groups, like it could be adventure for the young crowd or wellness retreats for older ones. The traveller’s concerns must be noted, such as safety, hygiene or overcrowding. You need to segment people based on solo travellers, family people or digital nomads.

The data gathered is too raw and noisy to be structured by categorising, tagging or linking to destinations. For example, Lisbon could be tagged with nightlife, while Bali with wellness retreat. Proper and structured tagging can drive real and quick decisions.

Now, once you have structured data in place, building strategies gets simpler and more effective. You know exactly what experiences or destinations are in demand, so you promote them. Personalisation also gets easy as you match users with relevant experiences.

Once strategically presented, the data makes your platform dynamic, open and trendy, driving bookings.

Use data tagging to build traveller segmentation into the supply-side record structure

So far, we have improved our data, but the data must connect to the right traveller to get the full benefits. We need to make the data work.

They can’t work in isolation. We don’t want the same listing to be visible to all; it needs to be customised based on the data that we have gathered. With the right segmentation, the platform understands the intent and the results are tailored automatically, so that browsing converts to bookings.

Even AI needs structured data to work upon. Without segmentation, even advanced AI produces weak results. Therefore, for relevant searches, faster decisions and a better experience, you need structured and well-tagged data that translates into revenue. You need to assign segment tags like the luxury segment or the budget segment.

High-priced amenities should be targeted to the luxury segment, while basic amenities could target the budget segment. And these tags are not guesswork; they are based on data that is gathered and analysed.