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

Google’s recent announcement that the company is backing away from its years-long effort to eliminate third-party cookies on Chrome may have led some marketing professionals to conclude that acquiring first-party data is suddenly less imperative. On the contrary, travel brands must continue prioritizing the acquisition of opted-in first-party data to maintain effective marketing strategies. 

The less attention-grabbing part of Google’s announcement indicated that they will allow consumers to opt out of third-party cookies in the browser, akin to Apple’s “Ask App Not To Track” mechanism, which has seen up to 75 percent of consumers choose to opt out of sharing their data with brands and publishers. 

Moreover, even when consumers are opted-in for marketing communications, they frequently appear as anonymous traffic when visiting travel brand websites. This anonymity arises from limitations in tracking and connecting user behavior across multiple devices and sessions, which hinders the brand’s ability to provide seamless and personalized experiences. 

“One-size-fits-all offers are not as effective as personalized value exchanges in acquiring first-party opt-ins,” said Ronen Kadosh, head of travel and ticketing at Wunderkind, a technology company that helps travel brands collect consent-based, first-party data and identifies anonymous traffic so they can scale hyper-personalized one-to-one messages via email and text.

The Importance of Personalization

An effective personalization strategy starts with understanding a person’s key attributes and fostering interactions specific to them. If a travel brand doesn’t know a person’s identity, from acquisition to triggered messaging, it can’t personalize offers or communication. This can lead to missed opportunities for engagement and decreased customer loyalty, as consumers increasingly expect tailored experiences that meet their individual preferences and needs.

“One challenge brands face is not knowing the identities of anonymous visitors, making personalization seem impossible,” Kadosh said. “Brands can’t personalize experiences for consumers they do not know. Furthermore, they frequently reappear as anonymous traffic once opted-in due to first-party cookie limitations or by using multiple devices. Recognizing their devices and matching them to a consumer profile is crucial for creating seamless, personalized interactions and maximizing the effectiveness of marketing strategies.”

The Benefits of Contextual Identity Resolution

To address these challenges, travel brands can leverage contextual identity resolution partners, which maintain large data graphs that create and store consumer profiles by observing billions of consumers’ online activities in a privacy-compliant manner. They track browsing sessions, including clicks and purchases made across thousands of websites, resulting in rich consumer profiles built at an individual level. They also use technologies beyond cookies to identify the multiple devices a consumer uses online and append that information to their consumer profile. 

“Wunderkind identifies a large percentage of a brand’s digital traffic, even if most of it appears anonymous to the brand,” Kadosh said. “We’ll first confirm if the visitor is eligible for the brand’s marketing. If so, we can unlock onsite experiences during their session and use our profile data to enhance emails and texts based on their behavior. That includes triggering personalized offers if they abandon a product category, a particular item, or an in-cart booking on their site. It’s worth noting that Wunderkind’s profile data can help lift revenue from triggered emails more than ten times over most email service providers.”

Wunderkind also provides value to brands by engaging with consumers who visit their properties but have not opted in.

“If a consumer is not opted-in to the brand but is in our network, we use our rich profile data to make a bespoke value exchange offer for the consumer to opt-in and grow the brand’s first-party database,” Kadosh said. “This context can greatly increase the chance of an opt-in over one-size-fits-all offers being presented to all visitors. But if they do not opt-in immediately, we use a soft ID to track their behavior on the brand’s properties and store that information to be unlocked once they do eventually opt-in. That data can be coupled with the brand’s own first-party data to deliver more personalized experiences and offers in the future.”

Identity resolution partners can identify billions of digital consumers. For example, the Wunderkind Identity Network identifies over 9 billion devices, has over 1 billion opted-in consumers, and observes more than 2 trillion events per year. This capability allows brands to connect consumer behavior across different devices and sessions, even when they appear as anonymous visitors. By recognizing these devices and matching them to consumer profiles, brands can ensure opted-in returning customers receive a personalized experience, such as maintaining loyalty program benefits, even if they are not logged in. 

Wunderkind’s 2024 Consumer Insights Report describes how travel brands can utilize this capability via artificial intelligence (AI) engines that personalize web experiences from the first visit, helping to drive revenue growth in the travel industry.

Driving Revenue Growth: The Case for Identity Resolution

“Before partnering with Wunderkind, most brands achieve only up to 2 percent of their bookings or revenue through their own channel retargeting efforts, like email and SMS,” Kadosh said. “However, with Wunderkind, this figure increases by three to five times, often accounting for over 5 percent of a brand’s revenue and making Wunderkind one of their top retargeting channels. This means brands acquire customers more efficiently than through paid channels like Meta or search engines, allowing them to reinvest those savings into other marketing efforts.”

For example, a theme park partner found that retargeting through Wunderkind was 500 percent more efficient than through Meta. By predicting the actions of their anonymous users, Wunderkind was able to scale their owned-channel retargeting and drive outcomes. In addition, an airline ticketing agency sees nearly 8 percent of its total digital revenue attributed to Wunderkind’s services.

“This approach doesn’t just provide data but enables brands to achieve unprecedented retargeting results, enhancing the efficiency of their overall marketing strategies,” Kadosh said.

In another example, Kadosh noted how Wunderkind helped a leading global car rental provider boost website growth, optimize email capture, and reduce reservation abandonment: “By enhancing user experience, streamlining navigation, and re-engaging customers at crucial decision points, they achieved a remarkable 14-times increase in performance, significantly increasing direct bookings and contributing 4.3 percent to digital revenue.”

Kadosh also highlighted that Wunderkind has a proven track record in retail and e-commerce: “We’ve worked with top brands like Harley-Davidson, Travelpro, and HelloFresh,” he said. “These companies have often tried to handle data on their own using first-party cookies, leading to only modest revenue increases of 20 to 50 percent. In contrast, Wunderkind can boost revenue by 300 to 500 percent while saving time and resources.”  

Wunderkind’s roster in the travel, hospitality, entertainment, and event ticketing space is also rapidly expanding. Brands such as SeaWorld, AAA, and Gate 1 Travel are publishing case studies, and several car rental and ticketing organizations are active clients.

As the travel industry catches up to retail and e-commerce in adopting advanced technologies and navigates the complexities of modern marketing, leveraging first-party data and contextual identity resolution becomes essential. Travel brands can substantially improve direct bookings and customer engagement by effectively identifying and engaging with anonymous visitors. 

Learn how to optimize your customer acquisition and engagement strategies by downloading Wunderkind’s 2024 Consumer Insights Report. 

This content was created collaboratively by Wunderkind and Skift’s branded content studio, SkiftX.