Title

AWS re:Invent 2023 - How Choice Hotels is unifying guest profiles to drive personalization (TRV203)

Summary

Choice Hotels, a major lodging franchisor, is leveraging AWS to unify guest profiles for enhanced personalization.
The company faces challenges in uniquely identifying customers due to various booking channels and inconsistent customer data.
AWS's Unified Profiles for Travelers and Guests (UPT) offers specialized schemas and APIs for the travel industry, enabling search, retrieval, deletion, and merging of customer profiles.
Choice Hotels conducted a proof of concept (POC) using over 100 million customer profiles from Redshift, booking data, and clickstream data.
Data was extracted from Redshift using unload statements and transformed for compatibility with UPT using AWS Lambda and Kinesis.
Four matching rules were applied for identity resolution, with automatic merging for rule-based matches and manual review for AI-based matches.
The POC resulted in 18 million rule-based matches and 7 million AI-based matches, with 2 million of the latter having above a 90% confidence score.
The system also serves as a real-time data store for the Choice Hotels website, with consistent access times.
The POC highlighted the importance of data cleanliness and the need for manual review of AI matches.
Choice Hotels emphasizes the importance of a cost-effective solution for managing large volumes of profiles and the need to manage non-converting clickstream data profiles separately.

The complexity of customer data in the hospitality industry requires sophisticated solutions for identity resolution to enable personalization.
AWS's UPT service is designed to handle the specific needs of the travel industry, integrating with other AWS services and providing both rule-based and AI-based matching.
The use of AWS services like Lambda, Kinesis, and Redshift demonstrates the scalability and flexibility of AWS in handling large datasets and complex data transformations.
The POC at Choice Hotels shows that while AI-based matching is powerful, it is not infallible and requires manual oversight to ensure accuracy, especially in cases of shared household data or common anonymous values.
The real-time data store capability of the UPT service is critical for providing personalized experiences on websites, where response times are a key factor in user experience.
The POC underscores the ongoing challenge of balancing the costs of data storage and management with the benefits of personalization in the hospitality industry.
The insights gained from the POC regarding data cleanliness and the handling of non-converting profiles can inform best practices for other companies in the travel and hospitality sector considering similar initiatives.