How cloud-based customer data platforms are helping travel brands reignite growth

Customers are coming back to travel brands in droves, eager to venture to new places and sample new experiences. But customers have changed a lot over the past 2 years. They’ve acquired new needs and buying habits and experimented with new products, services, and brands.

That poses a challenge for travel and hospitality companies who can no longer rely on historical data or tried-and-true marketing and loyalty programs to grow the business. Instead, they must shift their focus to understanding customer behavior at an individual level and use accurate data to effectively segment customers, deliver personalized messaging and offers, and cost-effectively acquire and retain customers.

The good news is that in a recent survey by Amperity, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Travel and Hospitality Competency Partner, and industry expert Skift, 92 percent of participants said that they planned to invest in customer data platforms (CDPs). While that’s a promising start, the reality is that travel and hospitality brands have been slow to harness their power, with most businesses just waking up to its vast potential. In the Amperity-Skift survey, more than one-third of the companies surveyed haven’t even started to build a unified database of customer profiles.

As travelers’ needs and behaviors have evolved, creating personalized experiences has become more important. To stand out in the crowded travel and hospitality industry, brands will need to improve how they segment and target their ideal customers. Moreover, with costs continuing to rise, it’s more important than ever to target the right customers through the right channels, helping rein in advertising and marketing spend and lower overall customer acquisition costs.

Embracing customer data platforms

To successfully target and engage travelers on an individual level, travel and hospitality companies are turning to cloud-based CDPs. By helping businesses intelligently collect, analyze, and deploy data, these cloud platforms are unlocking information often held captive in legacy systems and silos across an organization. This gives companies the power to create a unified profile of each customer—the key to delivering a personalized travel experience. It can help a media buyer, for example, develop a targeted advertising campaign to inspire someone’s next trip or a front desk clerk at a boutique hotel to welcome a guest after an unexpected 30-hour layover.

It’s only been within the past few years that cloud CDPs have attracted the attention of chief marketing officers (CMOs). Part of the challenge has been learning how to transition from gathering data to actively using the data for intelligence. Cloud adoption is also lagging: 4 out of 10 in the Amperity-Skift survey said they have not moved their data to the cloud.

Although there’s a lot of work to be done to unify customer data in the cloud, a number of top brands in the travel industry are showing the way. Take Wyndham Hotels & Resorts, for example. With 9,000 hotels globally, the travel and hospitality leader needed easy access to its customer data to expand its loyalty program and grow the business. By bringing its data into Amperity built in the cloud on AWS, Wyndham built unified customer profiles for both its loyalty and nonloyalty members, giving its teams a single source of truth for customer insights. This allowed the company to create more segmented audiences and better targeted communications, leading to greater loyalty conversions and more personalized customer experiences.

The power of cloud

Cloud-based CDPs are ideally suited for uncovering insights locked away in siloed systems across the organization and helping activate a brand’s customer data for maximum effect. For example, using Amperity’s customer data platform built on AWS, travel companies can store all their data sources, including loyalty, point of sale, and reservation system, all in one place in the cloud.

A modern CDP in the cloud uses all of the cloud’s benefits, including agility and scalability. You pay for only what you need. You can experiment faster, and you can go global in minutes. What’s more, customers have access to a more sophisticated set of machine learning (ML) tools that they can bring to bear with new levels of power, scale, and speed. Some CDPs even come with out-of-the-box, prepackaged ML models that run analyses on channel preference, customer lifetime value, preferences, propensity to buy, and more.

With cloud-based CDPs that use ML and artificial intelligence (AI), you can transform marketing data faster and more efficiently. AI-powered identity resolution uses an ML model trained on billions of records that can resolve CDP customer identifiers, even when the data is inconsistent, and create that single view of each customer to create personalized messages and offers. You don’t have to write any rules, and you can add data at any time.

A hotel chain, for example, can ingest data from its guest reservation system, property management system, as well as their loyalty, point of sale, and mobile applications. A CDP imports this data into a customer 360 profile—a unified view of the customer—and integrates this data in a way that allows you to engage with them and provide personalized offers.

The simple rule is that the best offers start with listening. Try to ingest more data sources and learn. That’s where ML helps. Think of every imaginable transaction that you have done pre-trip and post-trip, and compare that to others. Then you’re able to take all that data and create a learning model that makes the perfect recommendation.

To learn more about how to use customer data to boost customer loyalty and retention, check out Amperity and Skift’s report “How Travel Brands Are Using Customer Data to Drive Growth.” And to find out more about the Amperity and AWS partnership, visit the AWS Marketplace.