Driving Customer Engagement with Data Enhancement for Travel Brands

When it comes to converting prospective travel customers to paying ones, the data you hold on them is the most crucial resource at your disposal. So how should you go about gaining and leveraging valuable data insights to make the most of marketing campaigns and improve the customer experience? 

Why is data so crucial? 

Data can help you: 

• Understand whether a customer or prospect is a looker or booker (i.e. are they new to you or a repeat customer?) 
• Determine who they are – improve first party data with third party data on demographics, lifestyle, behaviours and more – to help identify products most relevant to them 
• Find new customers using fully permissioned data for contact across multiple channels.

The more data touch points at your disposal, the better you can personalise your communications to an individual and reach them across multiple channels, promote the holidays most relevant to them, and even suggest the most convenient airports and most suitable add-ons to enhance their travel experience before they’ve even left the country.  

The challenge is how to get someone to provide this information about themselves. The use of third party data, millions of records covering hundreds of variables, can fill in data gaps. These third party data sets are designed to enhance the customer view and enrich the first party data you already hold. 

How to leverage third party data

Most travel organisations typically want to make it as simple as possible for a prospect (or looker) to register their details, so they often only ask for a minimal amount of information at the point of registration – typically this is an email address and a name.  

However, this provides little useful intelligence to help guide an individual through the options presented by your brand. But an email address feeding a standard welcome program can unlock a wealth of third party intelligence to help with personalisation – elevating the brand experience, which in turn commands a higher premium and results in a more loyal customer.  

Using APIs within your website not only enables the information that an individual has entered to be verified as correct, but also quickly connects it to a wealth of third party information already known about the individual. 

Equally a poor experience can really frustrate a first time looker, before they have even volunteered information like an email address. Imagine an airline API which tries to provide the user’s nearest start destination, but the user knows that, for a variety of reasons, this isn’t correct (e.g. no commercial flights, or a station that isn’t local to them or wouldn’t be appropriate for their family circumstances, such as a newborn/young child). This is a good illustration of why it’s important to use the right data at the right time and not just use data for data's sake.  

Step one: De-duplication 

As a brand, you need to be able to understand from the email address that an individual enters into your website is a ‘looker’ (prospect) or someone who has booked before (a ‘booker’). But the challenge here is that there are many different data touch points, e.g. an individual may have used multiple email addresses to make bookings over the years.  

With so much data in the mix, the challenge is how to bring this all together. Data linkage tools have millions of data points to create a single view of each individual in the UK, along with records of all historical touch points. It enables a brand to link different elements of data together to help with more consistent messaging across different channels.  

Once multiple datapoints are linked to single record, a brand can quicky tell whether this person is already within their marketing program, and thus how to message them moving forwards. Furthermore, existing customer data can be enhanced with demographic, lifestyle, and behavioural variables, while prospect data can be enhanced with lifestyle, digital, transactional, and open-source information. Both options help you gain a deeper understanding of your customer or prospect.  

Step two: Enhancing first party data with third party intelligence  

Once you have linked the data from the point of email registration as a looker or booker, you can link the email address to a further wealth of intelligence via a trusted data provider. Understanding the person behind the email address means you can service them with the appropriate holiday messaging, including the right add-ons, saving them time and making them feel more affiliated with your brand from the point of first contact.  

It's important not to forget about imagery as part of your messaging – visuals are key and should be relevant to your audience. Knowing if someone likes to take a city break or a beach holiday is equally important in changing the images displayed and the route an individual is taken down. If someone can relate to your brand from the moment they start their journey, they will likely spend more and be more loyal. All this information can be added to your customer or prospect’s email address and tagged to a historical base of bookers to understand who may return again. 

Relevant variables for those in the travel sector include: family composition; income; actual age; environmental preferences; preferred location (types of holidays); children (and their ages); annual travel insurance; location proximity; hobbies and interests; and newspapers and reading. For example, some travel operators have used a variable such as the presence of pets to help promote dog-friendly stays at the start of a customer journey. 

Step three: The importance of the right add-ons 

While some organisations use third party data to determine add-ons, it’s typically an off the shelf geo-demographic tool at postcode level, which helps brands to understand the nuances of who has more disposable income, who has kids, and so on. 

Knowing about the actual people who are looking at your holidays, flights, villas, car hire or even interested in your country is much more powerful: this is intelligence-led – rather than data-led – marketing. 

For example, if you know that someone likes ornithology and hiking, you can quickly change an image in a communication, to make someone feel affiliated to the brand. Another example of this is knowing whether someone has children and will therefore more likely want to hire a larger car but be less likely to pay for business class flights. Equally making relevant suggestions on where to start a holiday (such as from the closet airport) saves a step in the process. All this intelligence can be appended to your existing data. 

Putting third party data in practice 

Many different brands are using third party data intelligence and insight to not only tailor a customer’s journey, but also to fully understand their customers – to understand that they might not be always who they think they are. Sagacity has worked with a travel company, which uses 20 key variables to determine their marketing communications – for example, identifying key groups of individuals who are not their typical user and require a different messaging campaign – and even different ways of servicing them.  

A number of cruise brands initially used third party intelligence to guide individuals towards particular journeys. However the knowledge they have been able to gather on people visiting their sites has enabled them to overhaul their approach to customer acquisition and the type of people they want to target. For example, being able to identify individuals who may only ever book once, or those at key life stage moments, means that acquisition and add-ons are key. Some of our travel clients have seen significant return on investment by appending third party data to their first party data and incorporating this insight into their acquisition marketing strategies. 

Prospects and leveraging the appropriate channels 

Linking current customers, based on what you know now, to similar-looking prospects can stimulate future demand, enabling you to acquire the right customers via the right channels. In addition, customer data used correctly will drive customers to do – e.g. buy or book – more. But the customer experience at all stages is crucial, and personalisation is key to commanding a higher premium and increasing loyalty. 

Direct mail might not feel like your first choice for a marketing channel – but both Amazon Music and Google use direct mail to recruit new customers in the UK. With nearly 10 million mailings taking place within the travel sector between January and the end of February 2025, direct mail should not be overlooked. The key is to ensure the most relevant people receive communications, and relevance may be based around affordability or interest – insight only data can give you. 

Digital to physical activation 

Making the transition from a small piece of digital information (such as an email address) to a direct mail campaign is not such a huge leap, with the right data. Once the email is identified as a looker or booker, the customer or prospect can be profiled. 

Linking an email to a name and address is possible via a fully permissioned database, and this information can then be cross referenced against your brand’s CRM, with the appropriate brochure or direct mail collateral then sent out. Another option is to profile an email address using Income and Suitability factors in order to decide whether to include them in a more expensive campaign or not. 

Traditional channels still have a very valid place, particularly within the travel sector, when powered by accurate data. Statistics from JICMAIL, the industry body monitoring the use of direct mail and its responsiveness, show that, while often seen as an expensive channel, if the message and imagery are right, the mail shot will be put on the fridge or kept on a coffee table, thus ensuring greater longevity than an email or social media post.  

Driving engagement through data enhancement

Firstly, cross check all enquires and new registrations with your CRM to identify hidden loyalty. You can then suggest relevant products based on third party data combined with first party data in real time, thus increasing likeness to convert. Personalise journeys so that they are relevant to the customer profile, thus increasing loyalty and stimulating demand. And finally, don’t forget that traditional channels are still just as important as more popular online channels, for the right audiences, when building brand relationships and acquiring new customers.