In the past it may have made sense for travel and hospitality brands to rely on loyalty IDs as the primary identifier for their customers, but that doesn’t work any more. Changes in traveler habits and greater data complexity from more digital channels mean that a loyalty ID alone isn’t a rich enough asset to get a picture of who customers are and how to interact with them.
Millennial and Gen Z travelers are less likely to stick with any given brand but still expect personalization. The same is true for less frequent travelers who don’t join loyalty programs but want tailored experiences. Meanwhile, many customers engage travel and hospitality brands through affiliates and aggregators, which may not be accounted for in loyalty ID records.
In the face of these challenges, travel brands need to develop a more comprehensive customer profile that goes beyond the loyalty ID and unifies data from across loyalty and non-loyalty channels alike. If not, they will struggle with data fragmentation and an inability to personalize across channels.
The technical limits of loyalty IDs
A loyalty ID alone would be useful for driving business outcomes only in a perfect world - a world in which every customer signs up for loyalty at the very beginning of their customer journey and then uses that loyalty ID in every subsequent interaction they have with the brand.
But we live in an imperfect world, with complex customer journeys, a proliferation of channels with varying levels of authentication, and the non-zero chance that customers may create duplicate profiles. In reality, it takes more than a loyalty ID to get a full picture of a customer and drive effective personalization.
Similarly, having a loyalty ID as a main identifier makes it tough to collaborate with other brand partners — a loyalty ID from one company may not track relevant data when the customer interacts with the partner brand. And for brands that are merging or acquiring other brands, a loyalty ID is useless in connecting the customer files of the two combined programs.
Finally, as the adtech ecosystem evolves and third party cookies become more and more unreliable, travel and hospitality brands cannot simply rely on the loyalty ID as their primary key when activating first-party data in digital channels. The PII that consumers use to book travel often differs from the PII they use in social and digital media profiles. They may primarily use their business email to book flights, but their Facebook account is linked to their personal email.
All of this leads to silos of information about any given customer, which require tedious work or specialized tools to overcome. In order to understand customers and generate effective business insights, it’s necessary to pull together all available data on every customer.
Unified customer profiles: the data infrastructure of the future
Travel and hospitality brands can evolve their data strategy by building unified customer profiles that centralize and analyze customer data across all touchpoints.
Using advanced AI and machine learning techniques allows technical teams to match fragments of customer data and get an accurate picture of each customer. Tech tools that specialize in identity resolution can make this faster and more efficient.
Data sources should include CRM, booking systems, service platforms, and loyalty systems, as a start. This will give a clear picture of the customer’s history with the brand and form a basis for analytics and generating insights. This in turn sets up business teams for more effective marketing and personalization.
Unified customer profiles also come with data governance and privacy considerations, like ensuring compliance with GDPR, CCPA, and similar regulations. Since the profile combines data from so many different sources, it requires more robust governance than a loyalty ID alone, but this also allows businesses to implement better consent management and privacy controls.
What a unified customer profile unlocks for the business
Grounding the data strategy in unified customer profiles has multiple positive effects for travel and hospitality businesses, particularly for marketing, customer service, and revenue management teams. For example:
Better targeting and personalization. Tailored recommendations and experiences based on past behavior, preferences, and non-loyalty interactions help increase customer retention.
Consistent customer experiences across channels. Customers don’t have to reintroduce themselves to the brand each time, reducing friction.
New revenue opportunities. A more comprehensive picture of customers opens up cross-selling and more accurate forecasting.
Scalable framework for growth. Unified customer profiles allow the business to integrate new data sources, accommodate new channels (like voice and AI chatbots), or expand into new regions without overhauling the system.
Richer source for business intelligence. Unified profiles provide more information about each customer, powering AI-driven personalization, predictive analytics, and automation of customer interactions.
Broader ecosystem integration. Capture data from across the customer journey, beyond just what happens in the loyalty program, including ride-sharing, home rentals, and custom experiences.
Real-time data: On-site or mid-trip personalization becomes possible when profiles are updated in real-time rather than in batches.
Moving beyond loyalty IDs to future-proof the business
When travel and hospitality businesses first anchored on the loyalty ID as their main customer identifier, they weren’t wrong; it reflected a data-driven mindset and matched the customer behavior trends at the time. But traveler trends have shifted, while the digital landscape grows ever more complex.
It’s time to build on the customer-focused mindset expressed in loyalty program personalization and expand to account for a greater variety of non-loyalty interactions. The key to unlock this is in the shift to a unified customer profile at the heart of the data strategy.
This will bring about technical benefits as data silos fall away and business benefits that stem from a more comprehensive understanding of customer activity. These in turn form the basis of long-term strategic advantages, including scalability, adaptability, and the data foundation to drive more sophisticated AI and personalization.