Adara’s global CEO Layton Han touched down in Sydney yesterday, with his maiden business trip to our shores signalling the company’s optimism about the Australian and New Zealand markets.
Speaking exclusively to Travel Weekly at Sydney’s Pier One Hotel, Han said that the travel data aggregation company he has helmed since 2009 has an offering that puts it in a rarefied position.
“Every company has a unique data taxonomy. Adara has great technology when it comes to data collection and expertise around determining which data is valuable,” Han explained.
But the problem a lot of travel companies have, according to Han, is making the data they do have intelligible.
“We often speak to companies who say ‘I’m going to do something really cool with my data’. And we identify that the missing piece for them is understanding what those people [their customers] are doing outside their regular environment.
“These companies have a vision but not a deep insight.
“Destination marketing organisations (DMOs), for instance, do a lot of marketing, but are often data poor. They know how many people are visiting, but don’t know who is visiting.
“A good example in the US was Visit Virginia. With their data we helped them optimise their marketing and media to target specific travellers. They saw success after providing the right promotions at the right time.”
Adara’s commercial director, Pacific, Stuart Stacy, added that there were other – perhaps less obvious – benefits to be had from utilising data.
“By taking a holistic view of the market, we’ve seen examples of DMOs securing incremental funding from government bodies. That’s the power of understanding the data.”
Even large companies with colossal databases and vast resources can struggle to make head or tail of the information at their disposal, Han said.
“Another example we’ve seen is a global hotel chain (who I won’t name) who were having an issue with ‘one and done’ clients, whose loyalty they couldn’t retain. These clients were indeed frequent travellers, so that wasn’t the problem.
“What we found was that they were bored with a ‘generic’ approach when it came to marketing. They needed to be hit with different and more interesting products.”
Adara has grown considerably in recent years – there are now 175 travel related companies who are partners, with all contributing data to the platform. And Han has big plans for Adara in the years ahead.
“Our overarching company vision is to grow the travel industry together. Through a better understanding of data, analytics, insight and measurement, we can help clients make informed decisions around marketing and advertising targets.
“We are aiming to be the world’s travel co-op. And Australia is a very important market for us. We are doing a lot of work with all the US airlines that fly into Australia too.”
With such lofty ambitions, one wonders what an ideal world look like for Adara. And Han is only too happy to speculate on the blue sky vision.
“Our goal is to collect every single piece of travel data possible.”
Adding value and validating data is also key in the modern travel industry environment, Han revealed.
“In a media specific sense, data integrity and gaining new insights are the most important thing today. You need to know who the data comes from. Advertisers are always asking for more transparency with data. And the co-op makes it more transparent.”
Sorting the wheat from the chaff is essential too.
“You need to go beyond the ‘cookie’ data, which is noisier and less transparent.
“You have to be focused on the people behind the data; the unique identifiers gained from all the devices and media channels. It’s about people ID data. Our USP is the depth of people-based data.”
And then there’s the elephant in the room of two ubiquitous companies, who reportedly gobbled up 90 per cent of new global online ad spend in the last 12 months.
“Companies like Facebook have a lot of great data,” Han said.
“But in a travel sense, they lack transactional data. Even Google don’t have this data; we collect a huge amount of booking data.”
“Facebook don’t know when someone is going to pull the trigger and book. We do,” Stacy added.
