Covid-19 and Card Member Travel
Understanding savvy travelers’ changing behavior
3 -5 weeks || Focus Groups || User Researcher
Background
As travel dipped and came to a standstill in 2020, the world as such had to hit pause. As time passed, our client launched several digital benefits to provide added value to Card Members (CMs) as the pandemic continued on. These were intended to continue providing value to the card and help users during a time of financial uncertainty.
As vaccination rates increased and folks began venturing out again we wanted to answer,
How our client’s financial tools and benefits can work with the prospective "return to travel” and provide value as they rejuvenate their presence in Card Members’ lives?
We sought to get a better understanding of some of the big questions, like:
How users were managing their day-to-day,
How users were thinking about and planning for the future, and
How they reacted to a stimulus showing new tools offered.
Process
To determine how best to understand the Card Member mindset, I looked into:
Web Analytics to get an idea of what benefits performed well on separate sites
Desk Research on how COVID changed travel patterns
Experience mapping, illustrating outreach methods and their impact on reaching different users. This illustrated how where we reach the user (like website, app, or mail) mapped to attributes like location, income, or access to credit.
Newly launched features and the associated marketing materials for context on their content, tone, look and feel
We conducted three 90 minute focus groups, each a triad session with a mix of card members.
Sets were grouped by card category, to increase the chance of sharing spending habits.
We recruited across a mix of genders, ethnicities, and locations in the US, within a certain age and income profile.
We intentionally worked with an interviewer unaffiliated with our redesign project
I built the screener and recruited participants to set up our research. During our sessions, I consolidated notes and conferred with the moderator on key findings. Finally, I developed our insights with recommendations, built a deck of findings, and presented it to our clients.
Results
We found a variety of information about the users’ experience with the pandemic, alongside their reactions to the marketing tools & content summarized below:
Experience map- recreation (with additional content redacted)
Emerging Themes from Interviews
We determined users were flexible but broadly on two sides on their readiness to travel. These stemmed from factors like:
Pre-pandemic lifestyle: How much they were already travelling, and its relevance to work or family
The “spend” mood: Did they feel the need to save or recently spend on big ticket items?
The type of job they held
Risk averseness: Accepting risks vs. the desire to wait for more clarity
Based on the existing stimulus, we could give strong recommendations for personalization like:
Strategically segmented messaging for those in different phases of readiness
Personalization to ensure consistent messaging and outreach to people
Using sensitive language to show affinity with their partners in the brand
Reflections
Yays:
We confirmed some past research and were able to map behavioral changes, particularly over the pandemic
We gained insight into Card Member mindsets and this new phase of the travel market, which had several applications in our ongoing work
It was effective in determining content to highlight, and fed into optimization efforts for CM sites.
Nays:
We were limited in our recruitment within certain benefit and utilization categories, and were unable to get a larger sample size to deepen this research.
We were unable to get insight into the results and engagement with the final content and marketing pieces, a more concrete record comparing engagement with financial tools, clickthrough on emails, and other relevant data would have been helpful to round out the research.