Unlocking unused customer data: A wake up call for travel and hospitality

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% 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 was 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, what their journeys looked like, and 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% 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% loyalty program conversion rate. 

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% of organisations aspired to solve the 360-customer-view. At that time, only 14% 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.