For travel and hospitality brands managing large-scale loyalty programs, the pressure to drive measurable outcomes is only increasing. You're tasked with delivering differentiated experiences that retain high-value guests, encourage direct bookings, and grow long-term customer value. Yet many loyalty programs underdeliver—not because the concept is flawed, but because they operate on incomplete or outdated customer data.
Customer Value Migration (CVM) is a better way forward—it’s grounded in accurate identity, enriched with deep behavioral insight, and elevated by a powerful analytics framework designed to:
Segment customers by their transactional behavior.
Track how customer value changes over time.
Rather than replacing loyalty programs, CVM complements them—revealing hidden opportunities for smarter segmentation, personalized benefits, and timely activation strategies based on how customer value evolves over time.
Loyalty is built on trustworthy data
It’s not enough to know who is in your loyalty program. You need to understand how individual customers are engaging over time—and how those interactions are affecting their value.
We often hear: “We can’t see how customer value is changing.” That’s because without reliable Identity Resolution, you can’t. Amperity’s AI-powered identity resolution solves this problem by unifying first-party data across every customer touchpoint—web, mobile app, in-person, email, and more. The result: a persistent, real-time customer profile that’s resilient to identity fragmentation (e.g., multiple bookings under different emails or accounts) and constantly improving as new data flows in.
Once identity is resolved, loyalty strategies become exponentially more effective. The next step is appropriately segmenting your customer base and understanding how value shifts over time. This is where CVM comes in.
CVM in action
The Customer Value Migration framework segments customers based on two key dimensions: how often they transact (frequency), and how much they spend when they do (average order value). In the travel and hospitality industry, this framework translates seamlessly: frequency becomes number of stays, and average order value (AOV) becomes average room rate (ARR). By combining these two intuitive metrics, CVM gives loyalty and analytics teams a powerful lens into customer behavior. The intersection of number of stays and ARR unlocks robust insights into not only how often a customer stays, but how much they spend when they do. Furthermore, establishing customer value segments across these dimensions enables the measurement of migration patterns—allowing you to assess which customers are rising, plateauing, or declining in value.
It’s particularly effective in industries like travel and hospitality, where customer loyalty and retention are key differentiators in the market. Using the CVM Matrix, you can quickly synthesize the state of your customer base and identify opportunities to migrate customers up in value.
The CVM Matrix in action: A simple and effective visualization of a T&H brand’s customer base in 2024. Why CVM works:
Traditional RFM falls short: Recency, Frequency, Monetary models compress behavioral nuance into a few buckets, making it hard to differentiate between lower frequency segments in a meaningful way. They also lack stable, longitudinal tracking to understand changes in value at the individual or cohort level (i.e., a "top 10%" RFM customer in 2023 might not have comparable value to a "top 10%" customer in 2024).
Signal, not noise: Number of stays is an excellent indicator of customer value and can be applied consistently over various time periods. Layering in ARR avoids overvaluing frequent low-spend customers, allowing clearer insight into true value.
Full-year lookback: Last full calendar year captures key moments like holidays and other cyclical buying behavior. These tiers are then applied across various time periods for consistent measurement
Brand-specific tiers: CVM tiers are built from your own data—not industry templates—so they reflect your business model and guest behavior.
Change over time: Track movement between tiers to understand how engagement is shifting at the individual or segment level.
Turning Insight Into Action: How CVM revealed an $850K opportunity with millennial women
All the CVM concepts we’ve covered above are more than just a framework. They’re fully operationalized in a Databricks solution accelerator built to help travel and hospitality brands run this analysis on their own first-party data.
This accelerator is packaged as a Databricks notebook that brings the Customer Value Migration model to life. It uses Amperity’s unified customer data as a foundation, enabling brands to segment their customer base, track value shifts over time, and uncover new, high-potential audiences—all with code that’s ready to deploy, adapt, and scale.
To illustrate the kind of insight CVM can unlock, we applied the accelerator to a simulated hotel brand dataset. The goal: understand which segments of guests are most likely to become the next generation of high-value customers.
Here's what we uncovered:
A significant portion of the “Potential Champions” segment—high potential guests who have the highest ARR but lower number of stays—were Millennials.
Within that group, women were disproportionately driving the upward migration from a lower value tier (“Needs Attention”), showing clear signs of increased engagement and long-term potential.
The modeled opportunity: Of the 25.8K millennial women who migrated up in value year over year, if just 1% migrated into the Champion segment, the brand could unlock over $850K in incremental revenue in the next year alone—excluding the substantial long-term value this group could generate with continued retention.
How we modeled this: Converting 1% of the 25.8K Millennial women who migrated to Potential Champions into Champions yields 258 customers. The incremental value difference (avg yearly revenue) between the tiers is $3,296, resulting in $850K in projected revenue uplift over one year.
This is exactly the kind of insight CVM is designed to uncover: strategic, data-backed opportunities to invest in segments that are on the rise—before they peak.
And thanks to the Databricks accelerator, your team can start uncovering insights like this today.
More ways to activate CVM within loyalty programs
The Millennial women use case is just one example of the strategic insights CVM can unlock. When layered into your existing loyalty program, CVM becomes a powerful tool for identifying where to invest, when to intervene, and how to personalize engagement at scale. It doesn’t replace your loyalty strategy—it makes it smarter. Here are a few more ways you can activate CVM insights:
Accelerate growth: Identify customers trending upward and provide timely nudges to reinforce that behavior.
Prevent churn: Detect when high-value guests are beginning to disengage and proactively win them back.
Personalize offers: Align loyalty rewards and messaging with actual customer behavior, not outdated assumptions.
Measure impact: Tie program benefits and marketing actions to tangible changes in customer value.
Because Amperity integrates with your marketing, CRM, and loyalty platforms, you can activate CVM insights seamlessly—across email, app, website, and beyond. Reach out to learn how Amperity and CVM can help you build deeper, more valuable customer relationships that drive long-term growth.