Industry Perspective
State of Personalization in Travel
Q3, 2022
The travel industry faces a stark personalization maturity divide as consumer expectations continue evolving beyond traditional hospitality offerings. While digital-first travel brands demonstrate sophisticated capabilities with most personalizing over half of the customer journey, traditional travel companies significantly lag with only a fraction achieving similar levels, and dining brands falling further behind. This disparity extends beyond implementation to foundational capabilities, as most traditional travel brands lack unified customer profiles, real-time data access, and clear personalization strategies. Operational challenges compound across segments, with the inability to justify ROI, limited in-house resources, and siloed data preventing organizations from scaling personalization efforts.
This report examines how travel companies can bridge the personalization execution gap through strategic operating model transformation and technology investment prioritization. It explores critical differences between digital leaders and traditional operators across hotels, airlines, and dining while providing frameworks for establishing enterprise-wide personalization capabilities. The analysis reveals how companies can progress from department-driven, technology-led initiatives to business-owned Centers of Excellence that deliver measurable impact, with advanced personalization strategies showing potential for significant conversion improvements when moving from basic segmentation to microsegment-based approaches.
FOUR KEY B2C COMMERCE IMPERATIVES
Incisiv
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As consumers continue to reshape their expectations,
enterprises must contend with a uniquely challenging landscape.
The consumer technology landscape is forever changing.
From Pinterest to TikTok, WeChat to Instagram, new experiences can rapidly gain consumer adoption and relevance.
From augmented reality to voice, smartwatches to chatbots, consumers are constantly embracing new interaction paradigms.
Commoditized convenience is eroding loyalty and margin.
Consumers expect convenience. If you can't deliver it, they'll go elsewhere - e.g. next day shipping becoming the new standard.
Walmart will reportedly lose USD 1 billion on eCommerce revenue of USD 21 billion this year as it faces challenges in its bid to complete against Amazon – from trouble integrating its DNVB acquisitions to impact on margin from its next-day delivery operations.
Consumers value experiences that are curated to fit their lives better.
They want to engage, be served, and transact at their time, their pace, their place. They have little patience, infinite choice and the freedom to swipe left at the slightest hint of friction.
