Bring past guests, passengers, and tour buyers back with timely, personalized offers tied to seasonality, routes, and availability. Reduce reliance on OTAs while lifting direct revenue.
Why it matters
Benefits
Target past bookers with personalized destination, property, or route recommendations to reduce OTA dependency and increase commission-free revenue.
Use need-period targeting – midweek hotel gaps, off-peak tours, low-load-factor flights – to shift demand into dates you specifically need to sell.
Win-back journeys can bundle upgrades, baggage, seat selection, breakfast, transfers, excursions, or travel insurance based on prior add-ons and traveler profile.
Automate service-recovery win-backs after delays, cancellations, overbooking, or poor reviews – offering apologies, credits, and reassurance to rebuild trust.
Use cases
Challenge
Repeat guests haven’t returned in 9–18 months and are now booking competitors through OTAs, increasing acquisition costs and reducing visibility into guest preferences.
Solution
Segment by last stay city, ADR tier, and loyalty status, then trigger a win-back series with member-rate messaging, flexible cancellation, and targeted perks (late checkout, breakfast) on need dates – driving direct rebookings and restoring first-party data.
Challenge
Seasonal route suspensions and schedule changes caused churn, and customers stopped searching your site for their usual destinations.
Solution
Identify lapsed flyers by origin–destination history and send route relaunch alerts, alternative nearby airports, and fare drops with real-time pricing – paired with loyalty miles accelerators to prompt the next booking.
Challenge
Travelers requested itineraries or quotes but never converted, often due to long planning cycles, group coordination, or uncertainty about dates.
Solution
Run a win-back flow that re-surfaces the itinerary, highlights limited-capacity departures, adds social proof from recent reviews, and offers a time-bound value add (airport transfer, excursion credit) rather than blanket discounting.
More industries
FAQ
“Lapsed” should reflect your booking cadence and seasonality. Hotels may define lapse as 6–12 months since last stay, airlines as 9–18 months since last flight, and tour operators as 12–24 months due to longer trip cycles. Many brands use tiers – 90 days (cooling), 180 days (at-risk), 365+ days (lapsed) – and tailor incentives accordingly.
Start with relevance before price. Use prior destination, trip purpose, party size, and add-ons to craft the message – then apply benefits like flexible cancellation, room category upgrades, priority boarding, or bundled experiences. If discounting is needed, limit it to need periods and high-intent segments, and use value adds (credits, perks) to protect ADR and yield.
Email is ideal for itinerary-rich content and packages, SMS works for time-sensitive fare drops and last-minute inventory, and paid retargeting helps re-capture shoppers comparing options. For loyalty-heavy brands, in-app and push notifications can drive repeat bookings quickly. The best results come from orchestrating channels by urgency – inspiration first, then price or availability triggers.
Track incremental bookings and revenue versus a holdout group, not just clicks. Key travel metrics include direct booking share, conversion rate by segment, ADR or average fare, load factor or occupancy lift on need dates, ancillary attach rate, and time-to-next-booking. Also monitor unsubscribe and complaint rates to ensure frequency and incentives are sustainable.
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