What Leisure and Tourism Brands Can Learn From the World’s Best Digital Customer Experiences

Your customers do not benchmark your digital experience solely against other hotels, attractions, airlines, resorts or tourism businesses. They benchmark it against Netflix remembering what they like. Uber telling them exactly where their car is. Spotify introducing them to music they didn’t know they wanted. IKEA helping them picture a sofa in their own living room. Just Eat turning a passing craving into an order in minutes. And Duolingo somehow persuading them to practise Spanish at 11:57 pm because losing a 300-day streak suddenly feels unthinkable. Then they arrive at a leisure or tourism website and encounter a downloadable PDF, twelve poorly explained ticket options, an unclear cancellation policy and a booking engine that appears to have been designed for an entirely different internet.

The organisations delivering some of the world’s best digital customer experiences are very different businesses, but there is a common thread running through many of them. Their technology works because it has been designed around an understanding of human behaviour.

They reduce uncertainty. They make complex choices feel manageable. They help us imagine outcomes. They remove unnecessary effort. They create habits. They use personalisation to make enormous amounts of information feel relevant to one person.

For leisure and tourism brands, the lesson isn't to copy Netflix's interface or introduce a Duolingo-style streak into a hotel booking journey. It is to understand the behavioural problem each experience solves and ask whether the same human need exists somewhere in your own guest journey.

Best-in-class customer experience starts with behaviour, not technology

Digital transformation conversations have a habit of starting with technology. Do we need a new CMS? Should we introduce AI? Do we need an app? What personalisation platform should we use? Those can all be valid questions, but they aren't necessarily the best place to start.

A behavioural approach starts with the human being on the other side of the screen. What are they trying to achieve? What are they worried about? What information do they need? What is making the decision difficult? What might cause them to abandon it? What would give them enough confidence to continue? Only then do we ask what technology might help.

This distinction is particularly important in leisure and tourism because customers are frequently buying experiences they cannot fully evaluate beforehand. A family might spend thousands of pounds on a holiday months before experiencing it. A visitor to an attraction has to decide which ticket is right before understanding the venue. An international traveller needs to trust that an organisation they may never have dealt with before will look after them when they arrive in another country.

Behavioural science gives us a useful framework for understanding those decisions. And some of the best examples of those principles being applied digitally can be found well outside the travel industry.

Netflix: people don't always need more choice, they need help choosing

Netflix has an unusual UX problem: an enormous amount of choice can itself become a barrier. The platform therefore doesn't simply present its catalogue and leave the customer to make sense of it. Its recommendation system uses signals including viewing history, ratings, information about individual titles and the behaviour of members with similar tastes. Even the Netflix homepage is personalised: which rows appear, which titles appear within those rows and the order in which titles are presented can all vary. (Netflix Help Centre) This is choice architecture in action.

The idea is particularly relevant to the behavioural research around choice overload: while people generally value having options, adding more options can increase the cognitive effort required to compare them and, under certain conditions, make deciding more difficult. This has obvious parallels with leisure and tourism.

A holiday company may be proud to offer hundreds of choices, while from an organisational perspective, that's breadth. From a customer's perspective, it can be work.

The lesson from Netflix isn't that travel brands need Netflix-style recommendation algorithms. It is that providing choice and helping somebody choose are two different things. Instead of asking how many products we can put in front of a guest, we might ask what information would help this particular guest confidently narrow those options.

That could mean better filtering, meaningful recommendations, clearer product differentiation, sensible defaults or progressive disclosure that reveals complexity only when it becomes relevant.

The objective isn't necessarily to remove choice. It is to reduce the cognitive effort required to make a good one.

Uber: some of the best experiences simply give us fewer things to worry about

Think back to getting a taxi before smartphones. When will it arrive? Is that my taxi? Does the driver know where I'm going? How much is this going to cost? Do I need cash? Uber's digital experience systematically removed many of those unknowns. The customer can see the driver's location, expected arrival, destination and price within one interface.

Upfront pricing is particularly interesting from a behavioural perspective. Uber says the purpose is to give riders greater certainty about what they'll pay before requesting a journey. Its European transparency reporting cites polling in which 90% of riders identified reliability and price transparency as important reasons for choosing Uber, ahead of safety at 88% and convenience at 86%. (Uber)

The behavioural principle here is closely related to uncertainty reduction and ambiguity aversion. Generally, uncertainty makes decisions harder. Give people greater clarity about an outcome and you can remove some of the psychological friction associated with choosing it.

International travel contains uncertainty everywhere. Some of the most valuable digital improvements a leisure or tourism business can make may therefore be remarkably unglamorous. They simply answer questions before customers need to ask them. That gives us a useful principle for digital experience design: Don't only ask what else you can give the customer. Ask what you can stop them worrying about.

IKEA: reduce the gap between imagining and experiencing

IKEA faces another behavioural problem familiar to tourism businesses: customers have to imagine an outcome before buying it. A sofa might look great online, but that doesn't tell you whether it will look great in your living room.

IKEA says 87% of its customers want to feel good about their home, but only half know how to make that happen. It also identified uncertainty about whether products will fit or look right together as a particular problem when shopping online. IKEA Kreativ responds by allowing customers to create interactive representations of their rooms and experiment with products digitally. (IKEA)

The technology is impressive, but the behavioural problem underneath it is more interesting. IKEA is helping customers perform mental simulation: making a future outcome easier to visualise and, therefore, potentially easier to evaluate.

Travel asks customers to perform mental simulation constantly. Photography helps, but digital experience can potentially go much further. Interactive maps, realistic video, 360-degree views, room selectors, virtual tours, itinerary visualisation and contextual information can all make an intangible future experience feel more concrete.

The behavioural question isn't “How can we use AR or VR?”. It's “What is our customer currently being forced to imagine that we could help them experience before they buy?” That's a much more useful starting point.

Spotify: personalisation should help people discover, not just remember

Personalisation is hardly a new concept in digital experience. But much of what gets described as personalisation is actually recognition. You bought this before. Would you like it again? You looked at Spain. Here are more holidays in Spain.

Spotify demonstrates a more interesting possibility: using knowledge of someone's previous behaviour to confidently introduce something new.

Spotify says Discover Weekly has generated more than 100 billion track streams since launching. Every week, the feature generates more than 56 million new artist discoveries, with 77% of those discoveries involving emerging artists. (Spotify) That's significant because the product isn't simply reinforcing existing preferences. It's balancing familiarity with novelty.

That is exactly what leisure and tourism should be good at. If someone repeatedly chooses independent hotels, travels for food, prefers quieter destinations and books cultural experiences, why should every subsequent interaction effectively begin from zero? Perhaps they don't know where they want to go next. That may be precisely why they've come to you.

Good travel personalisation could therefore move beyond remembering a customer's previous destination and towards understanding the motivations underneath their choices. There is a wonderful question buried in Spotify's model: What would Discover Weekly look like for travel?

Not an endless carousel of things an algorithm thinks you might click, but a genuinely useful mechanism for introducing people to destinations, experiences and products they didn't know they wanted. That's where personalisation becomes discovery rather than retargeting.

Just Eat: capture motivation before friction kills it

Just Eat operates in a very different category, but it demonstrates another important behavioural principle. When someone is hungry and opens a food delivery app, their motivation is already high. The interface doesn't need to persuade them that eating dinner is a good idea. Its job is to minimise the effort between intention and action. This relates to cognitive fluency and friction. The more difficult an action feels to understand or complete, the greater the opportunity for motivation to disappear.

Just Eat's own data also demonstrates how quickly external cultural signals can turn into purchasing behaviour. In its 2025 UK trends research, 32% of Britons said TikTok trends made them more likely to discover new global foods, while orders for Dubai-chocolate-inspired products increased by 2,684%. (newsroom.justeattakeaway.com)

There is a useful lesson here for tourism because leisure purchases can also begin with sudden moments of motivation. Someone sees a destination on TikTok. The weather unexpectedly improves. A friend mentions a weekend away. A child asks to visit an attraction. A concert is announced. A film makes a location culturally relevant. A sporting event creates a reason to travel. At that moment, motivation can be unusually high. The question is what happens next. Does the customer encounter an experience that allows them to act on that motivation, or do we put enough friction in their way for the moment to pass?

This doesn't mean removing every step from every journey. Some decisions require consideration and reassurance. The more useful lesson is to understand where motivation is highest and whether the digital experience supports it at that moment.

Duolingo: don't just design for conversion, design for behaviour

Duolingo takes us somewhere different again. Much of digital UX is focused on completion. Duolingo's challenge is not simply getting somebody to complete one language lesson. It needs them to come back tomorrow, and the day after that.

Its streak is one of the clearest examples of behavioural design in a mainstream digital product. Duolingo reports that learners who reach a seven-day streak are 3.6 times more likely to complete their course. The company has also said changes that made streaks easier to maintain increased the number of learners achieving seven-day-plus streaks by more than 40%, while celebratory animations improved seven-day retention among new learners.

This draws on several behavioural mechanisms, including habit formation, progress, commitment and loss aversion. Once somebody has built a 300-day streak, completing today's lesson isn't solely about gaining another day. There's something already accumulated that they don't want to lose.

Duolingo has extended that idea socially, too, creating Friend Streaks that allow users to maintain streaks alongside other people. That's interesting because motivation stops being purely individual and becomes a social commitment partly. There is an important lesson here for leisure and tourism. The industry's obsession with conversion means the booking can sometimes be treated as the end of the digital journey. Behaviourally, it could be the beginning.

After someone books, what behaviours would improve their experience? Returning to plan their trip. Completing passenger information. Exploring their destination. Adding an experience. Sharing an itinerary with the people they're travelling with. Learning about local culture. Checking useful information before arrival. Leaving a review afterwards. Recommending the experience. Returning next year.

The answer isn't to give holidaymakers a 200-day streak for opening a hotel app. It's to recognise the bigger principle: Digital experiences can be designed not only to help people complete actions, but to encourage valuable behaviours to continue.

The common denominator isn't technology

Put these brands next to each other and their technology looks completely different. Netflix has sophisticated recommendation systems. Uber combines location, mapping, marketplace and payment technology. IKEA uses spatial computing and visualisation. Spotify uses recommendation and personalisation. Just Eat orchestrates marketplaces and fulfilment. Duolingo uses gamification, experimentation and adaptive learning.

But look underneath the technology and the problems become remarkably human. Best-in-class digital experiences don't feel good simply because the technology is sophisticated. They feel good because the technology is solving a recognisable human problem.

Understanding behaviour can be used to create better choice architecture, communicate information more clearly, reduce unnecessary uncertainty, make complex journeys easier to understand and help customers achieve what they came to do. There is a commercial benefit to that, of course.

A guest who understands the difference between two tickets is more likely to choose confidently. Someone who can visualise an experience may feel more comfortable booking it. A traveller who knows exactly what happens after landing has less reason to contact customer support. Relevant recommendations can help customers discover additional experiences they'll genuinely value.

But the commercial outcome follows the improved customer experience rather than coming at its expense. That's an important distinction between behavioural design and behavioural manipulation.

Your digital competition isn't necessarily another travel brand

This is perhaps the biggest implication for leisure and tourism leaders. An airport will naturally benchmark itself against other airports. A hotel group will study other hotel groups. An attraction will look at competing attractions. There is obvious value in doing that, but customers don't live inside industry benchmarking exercises. They move continuously between categories.

Every one of those interactions contributes to their expectations of what a digital experience should feel like.

They become accustomed to systems remembering context. They expect immediate confirmation. They expect clear status information. They expect search to work. They expect payments to be simple. They increasingly expect personalisation to be useful. And when something is complicated, they notice. That means your digital benchmark isn't necessarily the other attraction down the road. It could be the best digital experience your guest used five minutes before visiting your website.

How does your digital guest experience compare?

LAB's Digital Guest Benchmark is a 10-minute assessment designed specifically for leaders in travel, tourism and leisure. Rather than starting with technical questions, it looks at guest behaviour and business outcomes to help identify where your digital experience may be creating friction or missing opportunities.

Take the Digital Guest Benchmark