Imagine you’re checking into a hotel after a long red-eye flight. All you want is some rest, but the hotel can’t find your reservation. On top of that, you’re a loyal customer with this hotel group, but they don’t have your loyalty number attached to your booking because your partner used an online travel agency (OTA). Eventually, they give you a room on a low floor right next to a busy street.
Experiences like this are common and can negatively impact traveler loyalty. Frustrating for everyone, right?
For the travel and hospitality industry, creating personalized, memorable, and stress-free experiences is key to cultivating customer loyalty and driving long-term sustainable revenue. But how do you connect these partial bits of information scattered across systems to get an accurate view of your customers?
The secret? Identity Resolution (IDR), which is the process of connecting data points from multiple sources to create a unified customer profile. IDR helps brands recognize and understand their guests' preferences across every interaction point.
With the help of Amperity’s patented approach, hotels, airlines, and other travel companies can move from “batch-and-blast” one-size-fits-all techniques to personalized booking recommendations that reflect loyal guests' travel preferences and past requests.
“We saw results literally overnight with double-digit increases in ROAS, click-through rate, and loyalty conversion rate.”
A patented Identity Resolution approach
Amperity's IDR process, powered by our Stitch framework, combines deterministic and probabilistic machine learning algorithms to create unified customer profiles from fragmented data. Unlike traditional deterministic and fuzzy match solutions, Stitch generates the most accurate and complete customer profiles available in today’s market. By using a dynamic matching approach that adapts to evolving data landscapes, Amperity ensures precise and reliable Identity Resolution across all customer touchpoints.
The Stitch process starts with semantically tagging raw data and labeling data fields (like names and emails) for consistent interpretation across data sets. Stitch then consolidates data from various sources, groups similar records together, and scores potential matches using patented machine learning algorithms. The matching records are clustered and assigned a stable Amperity ID, which remains consistent even as data changes.
Why Identity Resolution is so difficult for the travel and hospitality industry
Customers book travel, communicate preferences, and interact pre- and post-trip in ways that are more complex than ever before. While this is a challenging data problem, loyal customers expect brands to know them. Having a unified view of these customers and their travel preferences is key to providing a first-class experience. But without a unified ID foundation, consistently shaping these experiences is nearly impossible due to fragmented and incomplete data profiles.
Let’s imagine a traveler named Sam Smith. Sam travels for work and uses:
Her work email
Her full first name (Samantha)
Her work credit card
Her work’s loyalty program account
Sam also travels for leisure with her family and uses:
Her personal email
Her nickname (Sam) for her Profile
Her personal credit card
Her personal loyalty account
Without ID resolution Sam could be viewed as two separate customers, which wouldn’t reflect the value and loyalty Sam has for her favorite airline and hotel chain. One profile shows Sam only visiting major cities that are client hubs, and one profile shows Sam only visiting tropical destinations where she spends time with her family.
Since Sam’s profiles have enough similarities to Stitch together, the hotel brand can use Amperity to understand that Sam is actually an extremely high-value hybrid customer. Amperity generates a unified profile for the hotel that combines all of Sam’s travel history together into one view, allowing the marketing team to send her personalized vacation messaging for tropical destinations and upgrade preferences.
By providing her with relevant messaging, free upgrades, and consistent high-value customer experiences through different touchpoints, Sam remains an extremely satisfied and loyal customer.
Incorporate ancillary purchases to understand total trip value
Amperity Identity Resolution allows travel and hospitality brands to understand customer preferences, like Sam's travel habits for business or leisure. By unifying data, it reveals the total value of a customer's trip and uncovers additional preferences through linked purchases.
When Sam is on business trips we can see that she occasionally orders room service or eats at the restaurant at the hotel, especially on the night she flies in and doesn’t want to go out. During her pre-trip engagement sequence, the marketing team can now place messaging regarding the on-site dining options higher up in the email content blocks.
When Sam is traveling for leisure, she rarely eats on property since she and her family have more time to go out and explore the local cuisine. When Sam is traveling for leisure at properties with a spa, we can see that oftentimes her partner books a spa service but does not charge it to the room. Since they have the same surname and address we can identify that they are part of the same household. The marketing team can now replace the on-site restaurant messaging with spa services messaging and a link to prebook an appointment as part of the pre-trip engagement sequence.
This unified view can show the trip total for the customer is actually much higher than previously realized for the same stay.
Leverage Identity Resolution for automated OTA reconciliation
For travel brands, understanding the value and behavior of customers booking through Online Travel Agencies (OTA) can be a blind spot. Brands receive varied and often partially anonymized customer data, which disconnects OTA transactions from direct bookings, obscures the full customer journey, and reduces valuable margins.
Amperity’s Stitch helps travel and hospitality brands match partial OTA booking attributes to existing profiles from direct data sources to show a complete view of the customer. This unlocks new insights on previously anonymous OTA guest data while revealing high-value loyalty members. Marketing teams can then send activation messages that resonate with guests, encouraging customers to book directly:
Communicating offers at the right time: Target OTA guests with messaging about the brand’s OTA price match programs to remove incentives for booking anywhere else.
Sending personalized messaging: Leverage preferred hotels, destinations, packages, and travel habits based on past known transactions across direct and OTA sites to draw travelers to book directly with the brand.
Understanding intent: Use click-stream data to understand when someone has browsed the site directly indicating an intent to stay; then they can contact the guest with tailored messaging to complete the direct purchase.
By tying OTA transactions with direct booking, loyalty, and site engagement data, brands can reduce the OTA commissions they pay, in turn increasing profit margins while providing an even more seamless experience for their guests.
Seamless integration with Databricks Unity Catalog
With Amperity Bridge, you can seamlessly share Amperity’s unified data assets directly to Databricks Unity Catalog, enabling data engineers, data scientists, and data analysts to build a wide range of solutions to uncover actionable insights on customer behavior and inform smarter marketing strategies. Amperity’s Delta Sharing integration seamlessly integrates your Lakehouse with the martech ecosystem and ensures marketers can leverage their preferred tools while benefiting from the power of unified, actionable customer data for data science and analytics workloads.
To see an example of leveraging Amperity data assets in Databricks to understand the value of Stitch, check out our related Two-Part Value of Identity Solution Accelerator on Databricks Marketplace. To see other examples of uncovering customer data insights that drive marketing strategies, view our other solution accelerators listed on our Marketplace page.