Leveraging booking information for offer personalization and GDPR consequences

By creating personalized offers, airlines aim at offering their customers what they are the most likely to buy. Knowing customers is usually considered as a mandatory step to achieve that goal. In this paper, we will examine Passenger Name Record (PNR) data as a source of information, and how it can be used for a better customer knowledge. PNR data’s content is rich: not only on whom the customer is and on what he bought, but also on the history of his/her purchase (when he/she bought, canceled, changed). Once cleaned and organized, PNR data provide a solid base for personalization. But their usage is challenged by privacy rules, especially GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) in Europe. We will explain how. Most people think of personalization as producing 1:1 offers. The efficiency of such an approach is questionable. GDPR makes it very difficult. Nevertheless, making “personalized proposals” can come down to fitting what the customer is looking for. This way conversion rate and customer satisfaction improve directly. And the process remains achievable, ensuring a virtuous privacy approach. Statistical analysis of anonymous data and context usage can be combined for best results Anonymized data can be used to qualify consistent groups of customers, using very simple clustering methods. The content of a shopping request (= the context) can then be used to connect the customer to one of the identified groups. The offer that is then produced is adjusted accordingly