How Travel + Leisure Co. achieved 1:1 personalization

Travel + Leisure Co. is the world’s leading membership and leisure travel company, with nearly 20 travel brands across its resort, travel club, and lifestyle portfolio, including Wyndham Destinations, Panorama, and Travel + Leisure Group.

Before investing in Simon, T+L’s systems were highly siloed – data from different digital marketing platforms, call centers, transactions, and surveys were all locked away in their own applications. The company used ETL to bring its data into an on-premise database, which created new problems for the organization.

The team was unable to use data within their most important marketing channels. While they were able to join some data together, they were unable to orchestrate that data across their marketing channels. 

• It was a ton of work to maintain and update as new data arrived from their upstream systems. Before Simon, T+L had to staff teams of marketers and developers to keep up with more than 3,000 campaigns per month. 
• No real-time support: Managing data in batches prevented the team from being able to deliver personalized experiences in real-time.
• The lack of flexible computing meant the team wasn’t able to run advanced models or report on their data.

When the T+L marketing team sat down to re-envision their tech stack, they identified three main goals. 

1. Centralize their data within a modern and scalable infrastructure. 
2. Create a more efficient workflow to empower marketers to use data in ways that positively impact the customer experience
3. Deploy models to prioritize messaging and unify 1:1 personalization efforts across all channels

“Simon allows us to really follow the members on their journey from initial discovery and planning of their vacation, all the way through to showing intent and booking.”

^{Brian Lomonico}
_{VP of Global CRM at Travel + Leisure Co.}

By partnering with Simon, T+L’s marketing team can now grab data from any and all sources throughout the organization and put it to work in their marketing channels. Simon has simplified the process of building and updating segments–automatically and in real-time. T+L’s marketers can also now orchestrate highly personalized customer journeys across their website, digital ads, email, call center, and direct mail channels. 

Additionally, the company now has a continuous, bi-directional loop between its marketing channels and its data warehouse. They’ve created a central repository of data that is used for a variety of applications including advanced reporting and data modeling. 

With Simon Data, T+L implemented:

Vacation recommendations 

This data model recommends vacations to members based on where they are in their planning process by combining four key datasets: transaction history, inventory, demographic information, and web activity. With Simon in place, T+L can recommend destinations based on ‌signals indicating the customer’s interest. Once the user starts indicating intent toward a particular location, they refine their recommendations down to the resort level. 

Next best action 

As a membership-based organization, there are about 150 possible actions a T+L member can take at any given time. With the Next Best Action model, the T+L team sought to unify the organization behind a singular message by intelligently predicting the best content to serve to that member, at any given time.

“In every place that we’ve put personalized content, they vastly outperform the previous content that was in place - whether it’s measuring revenue, or engagement, we’re now seeing meaningful, incremental results from our personalization efforts.”

^{Brian Lomonico}
_{VP of Global CRM at Travel + Leisure Co.}

To do this, they analyzed each action across three main metrics: 

1. Propensity – or how likely they were to complete that particular action
2. Value – or what’s the action’s value to the business? 
3. Urgency - how urgent is it that the action be completed? 

T+L aggregates these three factors into a score, which then allows them to rank action for each individual per day. Layering these two models together unlocked a level of personalization that has outperformed all other previous content.

When a user has points on their account that are about to expire, T+L deploys the next best action and travel recommendation models to determine what messaging and destinations to recommend across web, email, paid advertising, and call center channels.

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