Radar travel & transportation playbook

by Radar Team on March 7, 2019

Industry-leading travel & transportation apps like trivago use Radar to build contextual experiences, delight users, and increase engagement.

In this playbook, we explain how the smartest product and marketing teams are using Radar to:

Change the in-app experience when a user is at an airport
Send contextual push notifications when a user is near a point of interest
Power automatic check-in when a user is at a hotel
Build segments based on travel behavior
Understand whether users are searching at home or while traveling
And more

Radar overview

Radar allows you to add location context and tracking to your apps with just three steps and a few lines of code:

Configure context types. Create custom geofences, enable Places (place, chain, and category detection), enable Insights (home, work, and traveling detection), or enable Regions (country, state, DMA, and postal code detection).
Integrate SDK. Integrate the SDK. In the foreground, change the in-app experience based on user context. In the background, listen for events. Or, before integrating, test with our toolkit apps for iOS and Android.
Enable integrations. Create a webhook or enable server-side integrations to send Radar events and user context to other systems.

For travel & transportation use cases, you might enable the following context types:

Create custom geofences with tag hotel or poi to generate user.entered_geofence events
Enable Places to generate user.entered_place events for airports
Enable Insights to generate user.started_traveling events

With these tools, let's get started!

Example 1: Change the in-app experience when a user is at an airport

After creating geofences tied to airport IDs or enabling Places for the category airport, you can check geofence or place state to determine if a user is at an airport.

You can then change the in-app experience, showing content specific to that airport, prompting the user to open their e-ticket or make a booking, and so on.

Radar.trackOnce { (status, location, events, user) in
    user?.geofences?.forEach { (geofence) in
        if geofence.tag == "airport" {
            // user is at airport, change in-app experience
        }
    }
}

Contextual in-app experiences can improve the user experience, increase conversion, and increase engagement.

Example 2: Send contextual push notifications when a user is near a point of interest

You can send push notifications in a marketing automation integration like Braze, Iterable, Urban Airship, or Leanplum, or in a custom webhook.

For example, you can trigger a push notification when a user enters a geofence with tag poi. In Braze:

Contextual push notifications can increase engagement and increase spend.

Example 3: Power automatic check-in when a user is at a hotel

You can also power automatic check-in, listening for events server-side with a webhook, Google or Firebase Cloud Function, or AWS Lambda Function:

app.post('/webhooks/radar', (req, res, next) => {
    const event = req.body.event;
    if (event.type === 'user.entered_geofence' &&
        event.geofence.tag === 'hotel') {
        // user is at hotel, trigger check-in flow
    }
});

Example 4: Build segments based on travel behavior

You can build segments in a customer data platform integration like Segment or mParticle, export events from the Radar dashboard, or send events to AWS Redshift, Google BigQuery, or another data warehouse through a custom webhook.

For example, you can build a segment of users who performed the event user.started_traveling more than 3 times in the last 30 days. In mParticle:

Personalization with segments can improve the user experience and increase engagement.

Example 5: Understand whether users are searching at home or while traveling

Finally, you can enrich behavioral events like app installs, app opens, searches, or purchases with location context using behavioral analytics integrations like Amplitude and Mixpanel.

For example, you can enrich search events with Insights state to understand whether users are searching at home or while traveling.

Enriching behavioral events with location context can help you understand how users engage with your app in the real world.

These are just a few examples of ways that you can use Radar to build contextual experiences, delight users, and increase engagement.

Ready to take your travel & transportation app to the next level? Sign up or contact our sales team. We can't wait to see what you'll build.

See our other industry playbooks for more examples and inspiration: