Case Study: Segment of One in Travel & Hospitality

Personalization in travel and hospitality is very complex because it has to capture and anticipate human intent across multiple channels, touchpoints, and contexts, including browsing, booking, check-in, on-property experience, and post-stay re-engagement.

Guests interact across websites, online travel agencies, mobile apps, loyalty programs, call centers, and on-property — often on systems that don’t share identifiers. Therefore, stitching together a coherent 360 view can be quite challenging. Often, the result is inconsistent personalization across channels. For example, a guest who booked via Expedia might receive a generic email offer from the hotel that’s not in synch with details of their booking or registered preferences.

Another big challenge is that leisure travelers tend to visit infrequently. Whereas retailers might have dozens of transactions per customer per year, hotels might have only one visit per year, or even less. This makes it much more difficult to build effective models or meaningful segments, and to create relevant campaigns.

Another key challenge stems from bookings made through Online Travel Agencies (OTAs), which provide limited or masked guest data to hotel partners, so CRM systems struggle in particular with personalization for OTA guests, unless they can get access to first-party data via WIFI logins, or loyalty programs or a digital concierge.

Also, personalization efforts in travel and hospitality often focus on only one channel (usually email or app), neglecting opportunities within the full ecosystem, including the website, call center or onsite, so guests sometimes get poorly-targeted messages. For example, a push notification might offer an upgrade that had already been purchased and confirmed.

Also, travel preferences are contextual by nature. A person’s needs differ at pre-booking, pre-arrival, onsite and post-stay, so CRM systems need to process signals quickly, and correctly interpret diverse signals from browsing behavior, current location, weather, occupancy, and other sources.

On top of all that, many hotels and airlines use legacy software that’s not well optimized for real-time data exchange or for AI-driven strategies, so personalization attempts often rely on pre-set rules, rather than on predictive analytics or AI.

But the opportunities from n=1 personalization (aka. hyper-personalization, aka. Segment of One) can be quite powerful.

One hotel brand we work with is successfully using AI to better anticipate guest needs, spotting patterns, and timing its offers accordingly.

Another hotel has been able to achieve remarkably-high satisfaction ratings, linked in part to digital personalization efforts (including online personalization). They’re also using AI-driven tactics, such as rate comparisons within the funnel to keep users direct, thereby reducing leakage to online travel agencies (OTAs). Yet another brand we work with was able to achieve an additional 2.8 points in brand lift from AI-driven communications.

Meanwhile, an OTA we work with is using machine learning to personalize the ranking (and sort order) of accommodations listed on their pages, thereby improving relevance and conversion. Yet another OTA is using highly-personalized ads to specifically target the visitors who are most likely to convert, using bid optimization and personalized retargeting to hit their ROI targets.

The technology that fuels all this is SOLUS.ai which was a first mover, and is currently a market leader in the AI-First category of customer engagement software. Notably, SOLUS has been able to implement the aspirational goal of Segment of One – acting as a system of intelligence that sits between users’ existing data sources and their existing engagement channels, generating individual customer-level nudges that combine recommendations, propensity scores, and stacked models, rather than broad segments or static rules.

The result?

In travel and hospitality, CRM teams achieve a 20-40% increase in add-on services (such as spa and dining), and from upgrade sales per guest, using this technology. In addition, SOLUS drives a 30-50% improvement in guest retention and repeat booking rates. And the combined result of all this leads to a 25 to 35x ROI (incremental revenue vs. cost of SOLUS), so the solution pays for itself in the first 30-60 days.

This is why many travel and hospitality brands use SOLUS, including ITC Hotels, Trident Hotels, Oberoi Resorts, ClearTrip, Flyin.com and Club Mahindra. Brands that have adopted SOLUS range in size from 50,000 to over 100 million customers. In each case, SOLUS acts as the core intelligence system, driving all CRM and loyalty efforts, enabled by downstream integrations with booking systems, mobile apps, SMS, email platforms, website and omnichannel messaging.

One key use case for Segment of One in travel and hospitality is predicting guest preferences to recommend room or flight upgrades, dining options, spa services or other experiences, based on stay history and behavior patterns. Another important use case is guest lifecycle management – automated nudges from booking confirmation to post-stay follow-ups, repeat booking offers, seasonal offers, loyalty program engagement, and inactive guest reactivation. And a key driver of ROI stems from ancillary revenue and premium bookings, where ML models are used to better identify the guests that are most likely to purchase specific kinds of additional services or upgrades.

So if you’re responsible for CRM or loyalty in travel and hospitality, then feel free to get in touch, and let’s do a test!

AI Master Group is a B2B channel partner for SOLUS. Full implementation takes one week.