How Travel and Hospitality Companies Can Fight Blocked Calls and Call Spoofing

How travel and hospitality companies can reach more customers with branded calling

Consumers have stopped answering their phone if they don’t know who’s calling due a lack of trust created by robocalls and call spoofing. US consumers receive billions of robocalls per year, prompting the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to make fighting unlawful robocalls and malicious caller ID spoofing one of its top priorities.

This has led to a requirement by the FCC for phone service providers to implement STIR/SHAKEN , a framework that enables the authentication and verification of caller ID information traversing their networks. In the simplest terms, STIR/SHAKEN digitally scores how certain the carrier is the outgoing call is made by the authorized owner of the number.

The goal is to reduce robocalls and/or spoofed calls, and ultimately rebuild consumers’ confidence the caller IDs they see on their phones are trustworthy.

STIR/SHAKEN appears to be working

According to a study by Juniper Research, STIR/SHAKEN and other measures “reduced year-on-year growth of fraudulent losses to robocalling in North America by 85% between 2022 and 2023.”

That’s great news, particularly for travel and hospitality companies that need to engage customers with time-sensitive communications about flight delays, booking cruise excursion, hotel confirmations or customer service callbacks. Ultimately, as robocalls and spoofing attempts are thwarted, more people will pick up when they know who’s calling — and for the most part, travel and hospitality companies are happy with the changes.

According to our newly released study — The Enterprise Call Experience in 2023: Travel and Hospitality — 73% of travel and hospitality companies said the benefits of STIR/SHAKEN outweigh the costs, and a significant number saw increased revenue as a result of STIR/SHAKEN.

But calls are still getting mistagged as spam or blocked

With the increased oversight by the FCC and enforcement from State Attorney General offices, service providers are under more pressure to stop robocalls. As a result, they have tightened the algorithm that detects robocalls. Unfortunately, the unintended consequence can result in more mislabeling of legitimate enterprise calls.  

In fact, nearly nine in 10 (89%) respondents estimated more than 10% of their outbound calls were blocked over the last six months, and nearly 70% said up to 40% of their calls were mislabeled as SPAM in the last six months. That’s a significant number of critical calls that simply aren’t getting through to customers. Mislabeling of calls and blocked calls can occur anywhere in the customer journey, including:

• Offers and promotions
• Scheduling
• Payment reminders
• Booking confirmations
• Customer service call backs
• Cancellation alerts
• Fraud alerts
• Information gathering

Travel and hospitality companies need to ensure their calls get through to customers

Our research found only 8% of respondents were extremely satisfied with their organization’s ability to prevent outbound calls from being blocked or flagged as SPAM. In addition, consumers just don't trust the phone if they are not certain who's calling.

TransUnion has solutions to help. TruContact™ Branded Call Display, Powered by Neustar^®, authenticates calls to ensure the call has not been spoofed, while enabling you to display your business name, logo and reason for the call on customers’ mobile displays. With a quick glance, customers can trust it’s your organization calling, increasing the likelihood they’ll pick up and thus, improving answer rates.

When asked, a significant 96% of respondents said branded calling could help increase answer rates.

For more insights to help you navigate your outbound call strategies, download the full Enterprise Call Experience in 2023: Travel and Hospitality report.