Personalizing digital experiences for millions of travelers

In the past, many peo­ple thought of air­ports as mere waystations—dreary stopovers that had to be tol­er­at­ed to get where they were going. But that view is chang­ing. Increas­ing­ly, trav­el­ers expect more of the air­port expe­ri­ence. They might want to grab a gourmet meal, do some shop­ping, or keep their chil­dren enter­tained. Whether trav­el­ing for busi­ness or plea­sure, it seems every­one is look­ing for the very lat­est in air­port con­ve­niences to make their trips smooth and enjoy­able from begin­ning to end.

With more than 78 mil­lion pas­sen­gers pass­ing through its gates in 2017, Lon­don Heathrow Air­port knows how impor­tant it is to make the air­port expe­ri­ence not only stress-free but also fun and reward­ing. The air­port itself inter­acts with trav­el­ers in many ways—including mul­ti­ple web­sites for check­ing flight infor­ma­tion, book­ing con­nect­ing trans­porta­tion, and reserv­ing park­ing. The com­bi­na­tion of infor­ma­tion and com­merce has helped the air­port build a data­base of 30 mil­lion con­tacts and, with the help from Adobe part­ner Acx­iom, Heathrow is putting that data to work.

Using Adobe Ana­lyt­ics and Adobe Audi­ence Man­ag­er, the air­port has built detailed cus­tomer pro­files that pow­er trav­el­er engage­ment cam­paigns. Using Adobe Cam­paign and Adobe Tar­get, Heathrow is also mak­ing these dig­i­tal expe­ri­ences personalized.

“Adobe Expe­ri­ence Cloud helps us achieve our goals to deliv­er an end-to-end dig­i­tal expe­ri­ence that focus­es on each customer’s inter­ests,” says Stu­art Irvine, Ana­lyt­ics and Opti­miza­tion Lead at Heathrow Air­port. “We’ve raised the aver­age spend per cus­tomer by 60% because we’re bet­ter able to reach peo­ple with per­son­al­ized deals and rel­e­vant experiences.”

The expe­ri­ence ranges from pro­vid­ing full-fledged e‑commerce inter­ac­tions, focus­ing on prod­ucts that trav­el­ers are most inter­est­ed in accord­ing to third-par­ty data, to shar­ing details about the shops and restau­rants that are near­est to a traveler’s arrival gate. The air­port is par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ed in nur­tur­ing rela­tion­ships with Heathrow Rewards cus­tomers, who fly at least five times a year and spend an aver­age of £140 each.

Using arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, pow­ered by Adobe Sen­sei, bet­ter dig­i­tal expe­ri­ences are cre­at­ed across vir­tu­al­ly every cor­ner of the dig­i­tal land­scape at Heathrow. “We don’t have the man­pow­er to con­stant­ly mon­i­tor and adjust the per­for­mance for a high-vol­ume area, such as the Heathrow.com home­page,” says Irvine. “We use the pow­er of Adobe Sen­sei to auto­mate our process­es and achieve bet­ter results than our team can accom­plish alone. We’re deliv­er­ing more rel­e­vant offers to each cus­tomer, which improve con­ver­sions and revenue.”

Read the suc­cess sto­ry here

Watch the video here