Amperity’s area vice president Billy Loizou shares how travel operators can best use client data to personalise travel offerings and boost sales. 

For modern travel and hospitality operators, understanding customers is paramount for success. One of the best ways a brand can understand its customers is to have as much relevant information about them as possible in a single place; ideally one profile and corresponding dataset for each customer.

However, according to a 2023 report from travel industry news site Skift, 57 per cent of companies are struggling with the task of unifying customer data, which significantly impacts marketing strategies and customer experience.

Implementing accurate, real-time data solutions for personalisation and customer retention should be viewed as critical for companies operating in the highly competitive travel and hospitality industries.

Brands implement loyalty programs not just to identify customers but also to gain a competitive edge and increase lifetime value. But, due to data silos and fragmented information, creating a single ID for each customer can prove difficult.

The consequences of the disconnect between travel companies and unified customer views are far-reaching. Without good data, a customer’s holiday experience might suffer, a company’s marketing efforts might be targeting the wrong groups, and revenue opportunities from loyal customers will be lost.

By better understanding loyalty IDs and utilising new technology to create unified customer views, organisations in the travel industry stand to boost customer experiences, retention rates and revenues.

Attaining a 360 View

An important goal for travel and hospitality brands is to unify a true 360-degree view of their customer, but what might that look like?

This might encompass customer account details across various platforms, NPS scores, survey responses, site clicks, and app engagement data, among others. However, it’s essential to broaden this definition of a loyal customer beyond those within the specific program.

‘Loyal’ customers are not purely those who have signed up for the official loyalty program. It might include repeat purchasers or long-time customers. These customers should be valued just as highly as those in the program.

Good customer data platforms should be able to help organisations identify these customers, make specialised offers to them, or even have them officially sign up for the loyalty program. But it’s often the case that disparate, siloed data sets make identifying and unifying a customer’s entire brand journey difficult.

Sometimes a single customer might have multiple accounts with a company under different email addresses, names or usernames, phone numbers and so on. Some customers travel under different personas, such as for work, with family, or with friends.

However they come about, fractured customer profiles can lead to missed opportunities to convert genuinely loyal customers. However, new technologies have emerged to address these challenges and expand the customer profile beyond demographic and transactional data.

How Brands are Unifying Data Today

One brand that has managed to overcome the challenges and implement some of the good customer data workflows discussed above is Wyndham Hotels and Resorts.

They worked with Amazon Web Services and customer data platform Amperity to improve their vantage point for customer data. Together they have overcome data silos, connected their data, and started to market more to loyal customers as well as loyalty program members.

There were some important unlocks for them when they stitched a unified view of their customers together. It opened their eyes to how many customers they had that were staying with the brand, that were members of the loyalty program, but had not used their loyalty ID on a lot of their stays.

The company was also able to understand for the first time the behaviour of non-loyalty guests, and what their journeys looked like, and in turn, what drives a customer to sign up for loyalty.

One of the ways Wyndham acted on the insights they gained working with modern customer data experts was by leveraging their unified customer view for paid media.

About 90 per cent of Wyndham’s digital spend now is pointed at a unified customer view inside Amperity. Because of that focus, Wyndham achieved double digit return on ad spend because of the way they can do smarter targeting in those channels.

Alaska Airlines is another brand that has benefited from innovating its customer data views. The airline is leveraging data to optimise the customer experience across various stages of the travel journey.

For single trips, the company performs real-time analysis of available seat inventory to surface available business class seats, then predictively targets the customers that are likely to upgrade.

They are also looking at the wider journey customers take, multiple trips, and using data to target non-loyalty customers for enrolment in the program. Using real-time data and advanced customer insights, Alaska Airlines has seen almost a 200 per cent loyalty program conversion rate.

Loyalty’s Limitations

Loyalty programs don’t encompass the full context of a customer journey with a brand, and organisations that only use that lens for marketing, promotions, delivering experiences or targeting new members will be leaving a lot of easy wins on the table.

For a time, loyalty programs were a sensible way to have an organised, intentional and reliable dataset of customers, but in a digitally connected world where companies run modern IT stacks, online booking interfaces, and plenty of data collection waypoints, customers don’t necessarily need to all be in one paddock for organisations to understand a great deal about them.

On top of that, travellers are changing, becoming more demanding. Scores of leisure travellers, numerous since the end of the pandemic, are more interested in having a great experience than signing up for a loyalty program that has typically targeted week-in-week-out business travellers.

This point was raised by AWS’ Claire Ward, director of services sector for Travel and Hospitality, during a recent joint webinar with the hyperscale cloud provider and Amperity.

“To create a great experience and to be able to respond proactively and reactively to customers, you need great data, and that data needs to be accurate and real time,” she said.

“I think that there’s just so much more data outside of loyalty programs that you want to capture to make sure you really, truly understand your customer, your touch points, and being able to create that deep profile so that you can react in all circumstances.”

During the same seminar, Greg Land, AWS’ Global Head of Accommodation, Lodging, Casino and Cruise, also chimed in to talk about where the concept of customer 360 was going.

“Every time somebody shops on [Amazon] books we have the opportunity to revalidate all of their contact data and all the data about the trip they are taking. There’s so much intelligence in that, and so much of it that [the travel industry] is just not using,” he said.

Land said that once organisations in the travel and hospitality sector could get clean, well-authenticated data that is managed, corroborated and unified with new customer data platform technologies, they would be able to do marketing, promotions, experiences and personalisation way beyond what currently exists in a typical loyalty program.

Urging on Unification

During the AWS and Amperity webinar, AWS’s Claire Ward said that the cloud provider had performed a study a couple of years ago, wherein AWS found that 82 per cent of organisations aspired to solve the 360-customer-view. At that time only 14 per cent believed they had achieved it.

“Since then we’ve probably talked to 150-200 customers to ask them, ‘What is the problem?’,” AWS’ Ward said.

“One customer told us they weren’t confident in driving marketing from the customer profile data, because quite often they found they would have 30 profiles of the same person.”

Not only is the usefulness of this kind of customer data questionable given how fractured it is, but it can paralyse marketing’s ability to target meaningfully!

This just goes to show that segmented data leads to inefficiencies in marketing and delivering customer experiences. However, as suggested through the discussion and examples above, by harnessing innovative technologies, like what is offered by Amperity, organisations can truly consolidate fragmented customer datasets into unified profiles.

The future of successful brand engagement lies in unlocking unified customer data for meaningful, personalised insights and subsequent interactions. These will pave the way for greater revenues, brand engagement, and most importantly, experiences.

To learn more about how Amperity and AWS are helping travel and hospitality brands overcome disjointed data challenges, check out our recent on-demand webinar, Demystifying Loyalty IDs.