AWS Travel and Hospitality Partner Conversations: Braze

Bill Magnuson: Braze is a comprehensive customer engagement platform that powers relevant and memorable experiences between consumers and the brands they love. Built on AWS, Braze helps bring modern stream processing, machine learning, and data-derived insight to brands’ customer engagement strategies. Our customers in the travel and hospitality vertical delivered more than 87 billion messages overall in the past six months alone. .Roughly half of them use Braze across four or more channels, including email, mobile and browser push notifications, as well as ephemeral and persistent in-app messaging channels, SMS/MMS, and Braze Content Cards.

Like AWS, Braze is a global company, catering to large enterprises as well as small and medium businesses. We number some of the world’s leading travel and hospitality brands among our customers, including Agoda, Bird, CLEAR, Deliveroo, Skyscanner, Trainline, and Yelp.

DS: Many companies across travel and hospitality have been managing through a period of unprecedented disruption. What have been the biggest challenges you’ve faced during this recent period and how have you helped clients managed through them?

BM: If you have traveled during the pandemic, you know that the experience has become much more complex, with varied requirements for testing, quarantine, documentation, and even justification for the journey. A simple dinner out requires familiarity with new regional guidance on indoor capacity, outdoor options, hours of operation, and health and hygiene protocols. Travel and hospitality brands can help consumers navigate the maze by being trusted and authoritative sources of consistent, up-to-date information.

At Braze, we see our customers’ challenges as opportunities to help remove complexities that create barriers to insight. While we can’t control the pandemic, we do collaborate with travel and hospitality brands looking to solve big operational challenges like the rapid deployment of upgrades to contactless ordering and delivery, regional variations in restrictions and recommendations, and enormous drop-offs or spikes in use, as in the food delivery category. It is also critical that travel and hospitality brands be able to keep guests and customers notified in real time of sudden changes that impact their particular travel, dining, and delivery plans. 

Delivery Hero is a great example of how this works in practice. While headquartered in Berlin, the company operates across five continents with three different constituencies: consumers, vendors, and riders. Customer engagement strategy is set by headquarters, but each regional market localizes the strategy. With the help of the Braze platform, consumers in each market are able to receive personalized, locally relevant messages about which restaurants near them have reopened after lockdown closures.

Braze is architected to leverage AWS to deliver personalized experiences at scale in real time across multiple channels. In a rapidly changing environment, brands must adjust communication strategies quickly—and our platform is designed to have the agility needed for rapid experimentation. Brand strategies can increase relevance (and deepen engagement) through action-triggered messages and geolocation, thanks to the agility of stream-processed data.

The pandemic is not the only challenge facing the travel and hospitality industry. Great in-app experiences and enticing loyalty programs not only help stave off competition from search, but also strengthen the first-party consumer bonds that drive direct bookings. When executed effectively, a robust customer engagement gives people an incentive other than price to choose a hotel or ticket.

DS: It’s been an incredibly difficult time for travel and hospitality companies, but we’ve seen many companies investing for the long run. With all the uncertainty, why has your company chosen to invest in travel and hospitality at this time?

BM: Even in the face of industry headwinds, we see our customers investing in Braze because they know that their future success (and even survival) hinge on the strength of their direct relationships with consumers. As travelers, guests, and diners navigate the layers of complexity 2020 has added to our lives, seamless brand messaging becomes even more important. Consumers today seek frictionless, trustworthy experiences. Whether they are moving through an airport, heading out on a road trip, walking through a town square, or waiting for a food delivery, they expect relevant updates and information at the right time, across any channel or touch point.

For Skyscanner, real-time, responsive messaging is a must for their international traveler user base. By leveraging the AI capabilities of the Braze Intelligence Suite, they’ve been able to target their users with a relevant, personalized customer experience. Understanding when someone is thinking of buying a plane ticket is different from knowing that they’re window shopping for an adventure. To see the best results, it’s important that brands understand what different cues mean and have the technology and strategy in place to provide personalized nudges throughout each customer’s lifecycle.

Another pandemic-related example is GetYourGuide, which quickly shifted to a retention strategy with the onset of COVID-19 through deeper customer engagement, even while consumers were stuck at home. The combination of thoughtful, inspiring creative ideas and data-centric optimization powered by Braze led the brand to see its engagement numbers rise at the same time that the travel industry was experiencing steep declines. In fact, their email click-through rates doubled as the industry benchmark flatlined.

DS: In the face of the current disruption to the travel and hospitality industry, we’ve observed incredible innovations coming from across the industry. How has your company innovated through these challenging times on behalf of your customers and what are you most proud of?

BM: Enabling businesses of all sizes to use the power of AI and machine learning to solve problems and uncover opportunities is an important goal at Braze. We’re not alone: Despite COVID-19, 47% of AI investments were unchanged since the start of the pandemic, and 30% of organizations actually planned to increase such investments. That said, implementing ML to achieve business objectives is not a core competency of most travel and hospitality brands, while it definitely is here at Braze. For example, we count on the speed and scalability of AWS to underpin Braze Predictive Churn, which is the first offering in the new Braze Predictive Suite.

Especially in these disruptive times, retaining customers is key to the survival and future success of the travel and hospitality industry. Take travel, for instance. One challenge stems from the fact that a given customer may only take a trip a couple of times a year, which means big gaps of down time when there’s less engagement with the brand. Understanding churn risk in this case is very different from a food-delivery service that a customer may use three or four times a week.

Braze Predictive Churn simplifies the task of identifying customers most likely to abandon a brand by using configurable criteria that each brand identifies based on its own customer lifecycle. By streamlining and automating the complexity that comes with sifting out at-risk users, Braze customers can now take the steps necessary to deploy a Predictive Churn model in under a minute. Within 20 minutes, ML predictions become available, enabling brands to target millions of users based on their churn risk. These churn risk scores are updated with fresh user data on a schedule that customers set themselves, ensuring that the actionable insights keep coming. Brands can determine when and how to change their own churn criteria based on evolving consumer behavior, always keeping in mind that shifts will disrupt predictive efficacy until there’s enough of the new data to inform the ML in a meaningful way.

DS: The travel and hospitality industry is incredibly resilient. As you look toward recovery, what role does technology play for your company moving forward? How do you see technology enhancing the customer experience and improving operational efficiency?

BM: We are glad to see that more than half of our travel and hospitality customers are using Braze Currents to help them listen more closely to customers’ preferences, gain an understanding of what matters to each person in the moment, and then act with agility to deliver the message that’s individually relevant to them. We believe that resilience is built into the modern technology ecosystem.

As brands’ needs change and grow, AWS, Braze, and our partners can flex and adapt accordingly. The old binary notion of a tech stack that’s built or bought is dead. If travel and hospitality businesses are to keep up with the speed of consumers’ changing behavior, they’ll need to prioritize data agility and flexible solutions that work well together with massive data sets from multiple sources. While these technologies have the capabilities to support companies during challenging times, the ecosystem is also agile enough to empower the shift in strategy that will come with recovery, and delight customers on their future vacations and travel experiences.

DS: How does building on AWS allow you to prepare for whatever the “new normal” in travel and hospitality will look like? How does the new AWS Travel and Hospitality Partner Competency help companies do the same?

BM: We value our ongoing collaboration with AWS, which makes it easier for brands to improve their ability to be agile in their understanding of customers’ context in the moment. Currently, we are working on a joint product demonstration that is specific to the hotel guest lifecycle, showing use cases for regrets (the travel equivalent of an abandoned cart), upsell (options to consider adding to their stay), and mobile pre-check in (triggered through geolocation when the guest is on the property). The demo will conclude by showcasing how all the data has been streamed to Amazon S3 using Braze Currents, and display the entire guest journey in an analytic dashboard using AWS Quick Start.

Guidance and enablement like this will make it easier for travel and hospitality businesses to pick up momentum quickly as recovery begins. Together, AWS Personalize and Braze Connected Content will make it possible for brands to ensure their experiences are in tune with each customer’s context in the moment as pent-up demand for travel surges once COVID anxieties are allayed by widespread and successful vaccination programs.

DS: What makes you excited for the future of travel and hospitality? As a traveler or guest, where are you looking forward to visiting next?

BM: Personally, I’m hungry for the spontaneity and novelty that made me love travel to begin with, whether it’s a chance meeting with someone new, or an unexpected adventure after a wrong turn or a cancelled flight. These days, everything is planned out to the nth degree in order to mitigate risk, which also limits the kinds of good surprises that can pop up. So, I’d say that I’m looking forward to something I can’t actually look forward to, because it will be an experience of unpremeditated serendipity.

Of course, I can’t wait to travel in person to the Braze office in Singapore again now that the team is able to go in, and I look forward to seeing the London team back in the city when it’s safe to do so. We just recently opened an office in Tokyo as part of our joint venture with Japan Cloud, and that will be an amazing trip when I get to make it. And since day one of NYC restrictions back in March, I’ve been looking forward to returning to the daily adventure of my regular bike ride to our headquarters near the Hudson Yards…but not quite yet.

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Bill Magnuson is the cofounder and CEO of Braze, a customer engagement platform that delivers messaging experiences across push, email, in-app, and more. Bill began his journey in mobile at Google working on App Inventor for Android and is continuously looking for ways to humanize the relationships between brands and customers to create stronger, more sustainable, and valuable relationships utilizing technology. He was named a 2019 Digiday Future Leader and one of Inc.’s 2017 “30 Under 30 Brilliant Young Entrepreneurs.”

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