In the travel and hospitality industry, first-party data is more than just numbers – it’s a goldmine of marketing opportunities. From booking preferences to loyalty memberships, first-party data offers a wealth of traveler behavior, preference, and demographic insights that can improve customer experiences and business results. But the real game-changer? Enriching that data with second- and third-party sources. By combining insights from airlines, hotels, cruises, and entertainment providers, you can create seamless, personalized guest experiences that drive higher bookings, conversions, and revenue.
Whether you’re just beginning to activate your data or exploring advanced strategies, this guide outlines key use cases that illustrate how data collaboration can transform your marketing efforts.
The valuable currency of travel marketers’ data
When used effectively, first-party travel data can empower brands to deepen guest relationships, improve campaign efficiency, and optimize conversion rates. In travel, first-party data becomes even more impactful due to the rich and diverse insights it provides, including:
- Customer preferences: Travel data can provide information on customer preferences, such as preferred destinations, travel dates, accommodation types, and activities. This information can help companies in other industries tailor their products and services to better meet customer needs.
- Demographic information: Travel data can offer demographic information about travelers, such as age, gender, income level, and family size. This data can help you target specific customer segments and develop marketing strategies that resonate with your target audience.
- Behavior patterns: Travel data can reveal valuable insights into customer behavior, such as booking patterns, spending habits, and travel frequency. This information can help you understand customer motivations and preferences, allowing you to anticipate and meet customer needs more effectively.
- Market trends: Travel data can provide information on market trends and developments in the travel industry, such as popular destinations, emerging travel trends, and changes in consumer preferences. This data can help companies in other industries stay informed and adapt their strategies to capitalize on market opportunities.
These insights aren’t just valuable internally – they can drive collaboration with partners across the travel ecosystem to maximize impact.
Data collaboration use cases for travel and hospitality
By leveraging privacy-focused platforms like clean rooms, you can securely collaborate with data – unlocking new efficiencies and innovations without compromising customer trust. Here are key use cases categorized by business maturity:
Taxi: Laying a data collaboration foundation
- Audience segmentation: Segment audiences based on demographic, behavioral, and preference data to create targeted campaigns and personalized content. For example, Omni Hotels & Resorts partnered with LiveRamp to improve ad effectiveness by 4x, leveraging customer data to personalize offers for shared audiences.
- Reach and frequency reports: Optimize ad exposure by understanding how often customers see your campaigns – and if your ads are driving engagement or sales. This visibility is critical in increasing campaign effectiveness and marketing investment efficiency.
- Incremental reach: Identify new, untapped audiences and determine the most effective combination of channels and tactics to ensure your campaigns are reaching fresh prospects.
Take off: Accelerating the impact of data collaboration
- Enhanced segment activation and lookalike modeling: Tap into a wider, more qualified audience based on shared insights with partners – driving higher engagement and conversion rates while helping to preserve privacy. For example, a travel booking site might collaborate with an airline to combine their first-party data in a clean room, creating pseudonymized profiles of top customers and using those profiles to build lookalike models and target similar potential customers on external platforms like social media.
- Incremental conversions: Measure the unique value and effectiveness of specific campaign tactics and partner contributions in driving outcomes beyond what would occur organically. This can help you better understand the value of your marketing as well as how brand partners elevate your customer insights and the customer experience.
- Time to conversion: Uncover the time between ad exposure and conversion, including both first- and last-touch approaches. At a campaign level, discover which creative drives the most engagement and which channels perform best. This can help inform which stage of the customer journey has the highest rate of attrition and conversion.
- Co-marketing: Collaborate with partners on joint campaigns and measure cross-promotional effectiveness without exposing customer-level data. For example, an airline and hotel chain might contribute their booking and ad engagement data to a clean room, then analyze how often customers who engage with the airline’s marketing also make a hotel booking with the partner, without directly sharing personal identifiers.
Cruising altitude: Reach new business heights with data collaboration
- Ad targeting and optimization: Use clean rooms to collaborate on advertising data and optimize ad targeting strategies. By sharing data on ad performance, audience behavior, and conversion rates, you can improve the effectiveness of your ad campaigns and maximize their return on investment.
- Partnership opportunities: By collaborating with data on customer preferences, booking patterns, and market trends, you can identify partnership opportunities and create joint marketing campaigns or promotions to attract more customers. For example, United Mileage Plus leverages data collaboration to build partnerships that deliver personalized customer experiences while protecting consumer privacy.
- Data monetization through travel media networks: By sharing data with trusted partners and third-party vendors, you can unlock new revenue streams and create additional value from their data. In a competitive market, data monetization gives you a crucial advantage by offsetting costs and opening up new growth opportunities beyond traditional bookings. For example, through its media network, Tripadvisor is turning its data into a revenue stream by offering advertisers high-value, targetable audiences through data collaboration.
From insights to impact
Data collaboration is essential to your competitive advantage in today’s travel and hospitality industry. Whether you’re activating basic segmentation strategies or building advanced travel media networks, the key to success lies in leveraging your data assets in privacy-conscious, innovative ways.
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