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Travel Company

Transforming Customer Experience for a Travel Company through AI/ML-Based Personalization

Challenge

Our client, a leading omnichannel travel company in EMEA, excels in offering a comprehensive range of booking services including hotels, flights and holiday packages. Embracing modern technologies, they have expanded their service delivery across various touchpoints to enhance the digital customer experience and enrich the customer journey.

They faced challenges in providing personalized recommendations for their audience. Specific issues included inefficient flight, hotel and holiday package-related recommendations that resulted in low click-through rates and outdated technologies and disparate systems that hindered the transformation of usage and click-through analytics into personalized experiences. They approached Material to build an AI/machine learning (ML) based personalization system to offer immersive customer experiences that would lead to increased bookings.

Approach

Integrated API-based solutions with CMS to serve the right content recommendations and implemented a data lake to capture user activity from CRM and transactional systems via API
Developed a backend layer with caching and a personalization gateway for real-time recommendations. Built a custom activity tracker to capture near real-time events and update recommendations
Enabled personalization for different types of personas -- new unknown, returning unknown and registered returning users. Developed techniques to handle cold start situations for new and anonymous users. Automated continuous ML model training for ongoing refinements.
Provided recommendations based on demographics, usage and transactional data using machine learning, NLP and deep neural networks
To improve recommendation accuracy, item vectors and embeddings were created for resources such as hotels, flights and packages. User profile vectors were then developed based on implicit and explicit feedback to match them with relevant resources.
Displayed personalized content on various pages through widgets
Allowed content editors to configure recommendation parameters
Launched targeted campaigns to drive bookings and manage cart abandonments

Outcomes

Our approach unlocked significant business value for the client. By delivering AI/ML-powered personalized recommendations, we enriched the exploration and booking journey, boosting customer satisfaction and return rates through targeted campaigns. Utilizing near real-time feedback allowed us to continually enhance the user experience. Our customer experience consulting work led to strengthened brand awareness and fostered greater customer loyalty, resulting in a ~14% increase in conversion rates. Additionally, we streamlined the configuration of personalization parameters, making it easier for content editors and business managers to optimize their strategies.

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