In the Travel and hospitality industry, customer experience (CX) has become the brand differentiator. Today, travelers are looking for personalization – for experiences specifically designed to their interests, likes, preferences, and past behaviors. They are expecting curated experiences, effortless consumption, and engaging interaction in their journey. This is where predictive personalization comes in.
Predictive analytics is a key enabler of strategic decisions in hotels, restaurants, airlines, and travel agencies. This leverages historical customer data and algorithms with machine learning techniques to forecast customers’ likelihood of a future outcome.
In this blog, we explore the key challenges in the travel and hospitality sector and the role of predictive personalization in mitigating them. It also covers how Snowflake AI Data Cloud and Kasmo solutions help businesses to enhance guest experience and increase revenue.
Key Challenges in Travel and Hospitality
Data Fragmentation and Silos
Often, guest data is fragmented on different systems, including property management systems (PMS), central reservation systems (CRS), booking platforms, point-of-sale systems (POS), etc. This fragmentation makes it difficult to get a detailed guest profile and their preferences, which in turn hinders the personalization experience.
Balancing Automation with Human Touch
Automation and AI can play an important role in personalization; however, hospitality business owners need to know the capabilities of human touch. Autoreplies won’t always work, as conversations with staff build better guest relationships and create a memorable and personal experience.
Changing Guest Preferences
Managing guest preferences in the travel and hospitality industry is unique and challenging. Hospitality deals with individual needs, facing difficulty in prediction. Guests look for highly personalized services with constantly changing needs over time, increasing the need for continuous updates on personalization strategies.
Data Privacy Concerns
Customers are willing to share data in exchange for personalization, but they also want to know how this data will be utilized and maintained. Travel hospitality companies need to be transparent and balance personalization with compliance and protection regulations. Hence, it can gain trust and customer loyalty.
Managing Operations
Managing irregular operations in travel and hospitality includes managing disruptions, maintaining customer satisfaction, and controlling costs. Irregular Operations (IROPs), such as delays, cancellations, and diversions, significantly impact airlines, hotels, and other travel-related businesses, requiring robust strategies and resources to mitigate negative consequences.
What is Predictive Personalization?
Predictive personalization leverages artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to analyze large amounts of data and predictive customer behaviors and preferences to provide tailored services. This allows the hospitality and travel sector to offer guest-centered services like booking airlines, room amenities, reservations, activities, and attractions, to improve guest experiences.
Predictive personalization analysis and offer services even before the guests ask for them. From personalized recommendations to solutions, it helps the guest with the right service at the right time. Thus, reducing wait time and inconveniences.
How Does It Work?
Predictive personalization includes two steps: using machine learning models to measure customers’ behavior and automatically showing the best options most relevant to the guests. It is much more complex, including big data, predictive analysis, and then training with AI &ML models to achieve the most accurate outcomes.
To achieve this level of personalization, businesses need to have quality data. This process uses a variety of data types in order to predict a guest’s needs and preferences. The following are some examples:
- Booking data- consists of guests’ past booking information like hotel types, food preferences, travel duration, etc.
- Profile Data- essential to know guests’ names, gender, preferred language nationality.
- Behavioral data: includes the guest’s behavior in the context of their expectations of hospitality travel. Website clicks, search history, and other social app activities.
- Real-Time Travel Data- includes the guest’s current trip details, flight delays, hotel check-ins, etc.
How Predictive Personalization Can Power Growth in Travel and Hospitality? 
Personalized Recommendations
Personalization can use guests’ preferences to make individualized recommendations, based on the guests’ past behaviors and preferences. For instance, if the guest orders room service breakfast frequently, the hotel can pre-empt this and offer breakfast as a complimentary at least once or even offer in-room dining to create a better experience.
Competitive Advantage
Personalization increases customer engagement, setting your business apart from others. According to the survey done by EY “The consumer survey showed that 89% of people said they were planning to take at least one trip, with 50% planning business travel,”. T&H companies need to cater to such a large audience and be competitive, which requires personalization. When a customer enjoys the entire trip planned according to their needs and convenience, they feel happy and relaxed, which increases customer satisfaction.
Repeat Bookings and Upsells
Personalized travel booking offers untold benefits for both travelers and the businesses that serve them. This provides a new direction to match each user’s preferences and plans as travel companies can improve engagement, conversion, and revenue significantly. A personalization platform allows travel brands to provide real-time personalization with relevant offers—such as an upgraded package—at the right time they arrive at reservations, increasing upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
Stronger Customer Loyalty
Guests who are happy and satisfied will return and refer the business to others. Personalization engenders feelings, which contribute to satisfaction and emotional connection. Predictive personalization helps to provide hyper-personalized offers, rewards, and promotions that are essential for guests’ personal preferences, engagement, and loyalty.
Snowflake AI Data Cloud to transform Travel and Hospitality
Unified View of Guest Profile
The Snowflake AI data Cloud comes with an effective feature of a 360-degree view of customers. This understanding enables and expands with second- and third-party data from Snowflake Marketplace—you can provide increasingly personalized experiences at scale, starting, even, before customers check in. It brings a multitude of data together, like booking, dine-in, etc, and creates a more detailed view of guests. Also, data collaboration helps to access data easily and provide more seamless partnerships with both partners and providers.
AI-driven Interactions
Snowflake provides effective options for businesses to provide AI-driven customer services and interactions. With the help of Snowflake’s trusted large language models (LLMs), travel companies can create efficient customer service chatbots. This is useful in offering more tailored interactions regarding confirmations for bookings, even travel status updates, or dine-in reservations. Thus, predictive capabilities help you understand your customers’ needs, better optimize, enhance operations, and improve the customer journey.
Personalized Marketing and Customer Service
Snowflake’s Marketing Data Cloud empowers organizations to develop personalized and tailored marketing campaigns based on their customers’ behaviors and preferences to improve engagement. This leads to better customer experiences, optimizes marketing and advertising ROI.
Enhanced Operations
Personalization takes a skilled workforce capable of interpreting guest data, utilizing technology, and delivering tailored experiences. Hotels will have to find qualified staff capable of all three required skills. Hotels will have to recruit and maintain qualified staff members to improve efficiency, staff coordination, and make data-driven decisions.
The secure data sharing between different stakeholders and partners, like hotels, restaurants, airlines, etc, helps to deliver specific services. This personalization enhances customer engagement, defining the leaders and differentiators in the competitive T&H space by enhancing loyalty and repeat business.
Offers Scalability
The Snowflake AI Data Cloud can easily predict and handle fluctuating demand during seasonal peaks without affecting guest experience. With real-time data analysis and predictions, businesses can make quicker decisions and be prepared for consistent performance and availability. It is also effective to manage massive data volumes during high-travel seasons without performance glitches. Thus, Snowflake empowers airline hospitality, hotels, cruise lines, and travel technology providers to harness data and artificial intelligence to guest experience.
How Kasmo Solutions Helps in Personalizing Guest Experience
The role of data and AI is vast in meeting the increasing demand for personalized customer experience. Kasmo, with the Snowflake Premium Partnership, aims to deliver innovative solutions to enable travel and hospitality businesses to leverage data for enhancing guest experience.
Agentic AI
Kasmo’s Agentic AI solution helps travel and hospitality businesses to personalize service with the automation of booking, 24/7 customer support through virtual assistance, and gain real-time updates. Snowflake also provides safety and sustainable tourism; it also helps businesses to improve offerings with feedback from customers and gain higher customer loyalty.
Secure Data Sharing
Our solution enables secure and reliable real-time data among partners and stakeholders. This helps to mitigate delays and complexities in data processing and reconciliation. Gaining regular insights into customer demands helps to make informed decisions and accurate responses.
Service Recovery
The service recovery solution supports businesses in handling Irregular Operations (IROPs). It automates the cancellation process, resolves queries, and provides quick recourse in refunds and or rescheduling. Ensuring higher customer satisfaction by avoiding future issues and focusing on seamless recovery. Hence, it helps travel and hospitality businesses to elevate their customer experience and deliver personalized offerings.
Conclusion
Predictive personalization offers multiple benefits for the travel and hospitality sector. Using AI & ML, it can analyze large data volumes to provide personalized guest experience, gain a competitive advantage, and increase customer revisit. From data fragmentation to managing operations, predictive analysis helps to overcome major challenges in travel and hospitality.
As consumer expectations evolve, businesses can use Snowflake AI Data Cloud to get a unified 360 view of customers, enable AI-driven interactions, personalize marketing, and streamline operations. With Kasmo solutions like Agentic AI, Secure data sharing, and service recovery, your business can increase overall guest experience and drive long-term success.
