Skift Global Forum Roundtable: The Future of Loyalty, Ancillaries, and Personalization

This sponsored content was created in collaboration with a Skift partner.

Key discussion highlights:

• Messaging that actually matters: When a customer books a flight or hotel, they have so many more decisions to make about the trip — how to get to the airport, whether to reserve a rental car, where to make reservations for dinner, and more. Travel brands that focus on delivering relevant offers demonstrating a real understanding of the customer’s needs during this stage of the journey have unique opportunities to gain traveler trust.
• Personalization drives loyalty: When companies utilize the reams of valuable customer data at their fingertips, they can personalize communications and offers that create a more seamless purchase experience, inspiring more engaged travelers and increasing lifetime value.
• Looking ahead to the future of loyalty programs: Customers want recognition and incentives as loyalty members. Brands have to take a more holistic approach to engage the members of a loyalty program with more than standard discount offers and point redemptions. “Subscription-ization” may be the way of the future, but because travel is infrequent, brands can’t assume they can chase a one-size-fits-all, Amazon Prime-style model.

Travelers want companies to know more about them. In fact, 83 percent of them are willing to hand over their data if it means that travel brands will connect the dots in meaningful ways to make their lives easier and their experiences better. To turn one-time transactions into long-term loyalty relationships, travel brands must do more than sell products and services. They need to think about how to solve their customers’ problems.

At this invite-only session from Skift Global Forum 2022, Holly Aresty, deputy chief commercial officer at Rokt, and Wouter Geerts, director of research at Skift, led a roundtable discussion moderated by Kate Anderson, creative strategist at SkiftX, about how changing customer expectations are creating more valuable moments in the booking process that represent big opportunities for brands.

Learn more about how Rokt can unlock value for travel brands at the moment of transaction.