In The Big Chair - Layton Han of ADARA

Layton Han, CEO

Founded in 2009 ADARA analyzes data to help clients understand travelers’ behavior, patterns and trends to create more effective marketing and engagement strategies. The company has 15 offices across North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

Prior to joining ADARA, Layton Han was a co-founder of online loyalty marketing company MyPoints.com and served as its co-president.

Your slogan is that ADARA is “the world’s travel data co‐op” - what exactly does that mean and how do you justify such a bold statement?

Our position as the world’s travel data co‐op reflects three important distinctions. First, we have impressive scale with access to 750 million monthly unique traveler profiles from more than 190 of the world’s top travel brands.

Second, we’re global - our network of data partners and traveler profiles spans the globe. And the final point, we’re unique in the travel industry in that our co‐op is built on a collaborative model.

The co‐op stems from ADARA’s network of partners ranging from the largest airlines, hotel chains and travel service providers such as United, KLM and Hertz.

ADARA has developed a unique approach to managing data and collecting data from all the companies, while ensuring each data set has specific permission and usage rules.

All data sources are tracked uniquely and maintained in their own secure “walled gardens.”

As a result, the platform excels at integrating data from relevant partners to develop customer intelligence relevant and tailored to each client.

Mobile has become such a dominant channel in travel in the last several years. How has that impacted data analytics and strategy?

The rise and maturation of mobile has complicated the ability of travel brands to deliver a truly omni‐channel consumer experience. In response, there’s been a push to create a single, unified view of a customer across channels.

To achieve that goal, ADARA has evolved our technology to aim for both reach and accuracy in defining and enabling our audiences.

We have the ability to pseudonymously associate multiple device signatures to a single user. To activate these users, we orchestrate interactions across various channels throughout planning and booking.

Single‐user visibility also provides additional insights to the consumer purchase journey based on passive, ambient touch points present in mobile.

From the strategic perspective, we see our clients working to advance mobile to make the experience more convenient and seamless, which drives greater adoption by consumers.

New channels and devices will continue to emerge. The constant is our clients’ need for actionable insight based on rich data and advanced analytics to ensure that the interactions are meaningful and relevant irrespective of the mode of delivery.

A large part of ADARA’s business is with tourism organizations and DMOs – what should their engagement strategy be now that their visitors are "connected" throughout their stay?

Destinations continue to be focused on getting travelers to choose their destination over the alternatives. Clients value ADARA’s media and traveler intelligence solutions to drive visitation and measure exposure, providing the necessary insight to optimize spend.

Beyond simply driving demand, destinations are increasingly looking to convert travelers that have high‐spending behaviors once they are in‐market.

We do see an interesting shift in traveler behavior around the duration of key segments in the customer journey. We’re seeing longer time frames between search and departure.

Layton Han

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ADARA provides intelligence on visitor behaviors, devices and location, enabling destinations to find those more valuable travelers.

As an example, we’re working with the Arizona Office of Tourism to generate high‐quality demand by optimizing spend on programs that will maximize in‐destination spend.

They’ve also focused on more strategic goals such as measuring the economic impact of highly visible and popular events like the NCAA Final Four/March Madness.

And in that vein, how do DMOs use data to potentially compete with OTAs and suppliers for the eyeballs of visitors?

We launched ADARA’s Impact suite to provide DMOs and tourism board customers with increased traveler intelligence, a holistic view of website effectiveness, insight into real travel outcomes and an ability to optimize marketing spend.

By identifying actionable insights including traveler origin markets, search to booking windows and spend on hotel nights, ADARA is able to help DMOs and tourism boards determine how to allocate their budget to achieve optimum results.

More than ever, travel brands are fighting tech giants like Google, Amazon and Facebook for consumers’ attention. How can they stay competitive?

The travel brands that have been effective in managing their relationships with Google and Facebook have pursued a two‐pronged approach.

The first prong is a collaborative approach recognizing that the “giants” provide valuable access to infrequent travelers at the top of the funnel. The second prong is focused on winning over the traveler and establishing brand affinity.

Winning travel brands are leveraging their control over the sales of add‐on services and the delivery of services to create a competitive edge.

What trends have you seen around traveler behavior in recent years?

We do see an interesting shift in traveler behavior around the duration of key segments in the customer journey. We’re seeing longer time frames between search and departure.

In particular, the booking window (book to departure) has increased significantly in the last three years - rising from 31 days to 37 days.

This longer post‐booking period offers an opportunity for travel brands and destinations to merchandise additional high‐value services.

The shift in consumer expectations for relevance and personalization drives many of the conversations we’re having with our clients.

We’re often called in by clients to enhance their targeting across all channels. In some cases, it’s to drive more direct bookings.

We’re also using our Traveler Value Score (individual‐level recency, frequency and monetary value) to determine key segments for loyalty campaigns.

As technology improves, how does that impact your ability to measure ROI for your clients?

These improvements allow ADARA to measure ROI for a greater variety of use cases and touch points.

Clients are embracing advanced analytics in digital marketing and post‐sale offer management and are evolving beyond last touch attribution to a more sophisticated ROI matrix.

ADARA is well-positioned to enable our clients’ ROI evolution because we have three critical accelerators: 1) our enormous data sets, 2) ability to touch and reach individuals on multiple parts of their purchase journey and 3) our understanding of engagement post-purchase.

ADARA recently announced a partnership with PATA – the Pacific Asia Travel Association. How important are partnerships to your business strategy?

Partnerships are at the heart of ADARA’s business model. Partnerships power the data co‐op to share data safely and securely between different but connected data sets.

These partnerships enable us to unlock actionable insights that would have remained separate and unused.

The partnership with PATA is an important strategic relationship for us and builds on similar partnerships that we have with other tourism industry associations around the world.

PATA is keen to ensure that their members are aware of and have access to the latest marketing innovations and technology that can most effectively help drive arrivals to their destinations. In turn we appreciate the platform that PATA can provide to allow us to connect with their DMO members across the APAC region.

And what are your thoughts on the growing APAC market?

It hardly needs to be said that APAC represents a unique growth opportunity for the travel industry.

Some of the key macro trends include the incredible volume of new travelers from markets like China, India and Southeast Asia; the rapid rise of inbound travel to Japan; and the increasing impact of mobile/data technologies on travel planning across the region.

We are working with our partners to align to these opportunities, particularly with regards to them being able to leverage our technologies to meet the expectations of consumers and compete effectively in this fast‐evolving region.

The diversity of the region in terms of geography, culture and levels of development requires localized strategies and execution.

But the travel market operates regionally and globally. The ADARA data co‐op provides a common platform that can help overcome local fragmentation across the region and provide access to global scale.

We cover both ends of the spectrum: global scale while providing the flexibility to meet local objectives, as needed.

What is the biggest challenge you face when talking to prospective clients?

Our biggest challenge is overcoming preconceived notions around data assets. It’s very rare for a company in today's environment to have a data asset with the breadth and depth of data that ADARA has built.

Moreover, all too often clients fail to see the link between the insight and the ability to take action on it and drive results. We’re overcoming this challenge by building out a robust suite of offerings.

In the very near future we will be expanding our capabilities to power site personalization, customer segmentation, CRM and loyalty communications and measurement.

By expanding our offerings, clients will derive greater benefits from our unique data asset as we help them boost the effectiveness of their marketing and business strategies.

With the Facebook data issues of the past year, along with GDPR, how do you balance the need to gather meaningful data with consumers’ privacy concerns?

Ensuring data privacy has always been at the core of our business. Our partners work with us because they trust us. We don’t see it as a trade‐off between consumer privacy and useful data - safeguarding our partner’s data comes first.

With GDPR, we reviewed our processes and made upgrades as necessary to ensure compliance. We don’t collect sensitive data such as name and address or other direct ways to identify customers.

Our first priority is privacy protection. We’re fortunate that due to our longstanding partnerships, our focus on privacy doesn’t diminish our access to rich, actionable marketing data.

Gives us a sense of what is in the works for ADARA in the coming three to five years.

While we’ve got plenty on our plate as we expand our offerings, we’re always exploring the new approaches that will fuel ADARA’s continued success:

• Global expansion: We’ll be extending beyond the strongholds we’ve established in parts of Europe, the Middle East and Asia to grow our footprint in tandem with the industry.
• Actionable intelligence: We’re experimenting with new data sets and emerging analytical tools to create solutions that are not just predictive of consumer behavior, but guide interventions to actively influence behavior.
• Private co‐op: Our clients have been asking us to repurpose our co‐op model to support private co‐ops. Using Designated Access Data Exchange (DADE) to enable the shared data is faster than building a database. Furthering this technology along with blockchain supports several use cases such as exchanging data between brands for a more cohesive consumer experience, and between loyalty partners to manage customer service and redemption transactions.

How do you motivate your team?

As a company, our passion for travel motivates us to expand our collaborative, industry-wide data platform to help grow the global travel industry. The travel industry isn’t a zero-sum game with winners and losers.

We’re all better off with more people traveling more frequently because it drives economic growth and greater understanding.

My job is to foster that passion for travel, data and technology to create and deliver solutions that enable the industry to thrive.

Faced with two equally qualified people for a senior role, how do you select the one to hire?

It’s about fit with the organization. There are a handful of values that are ingrained in our company culture and we continue to foster.

We pride ourselves on our collaborative spirit, courage, integrity, curiosity, accountability and impact. It’s important to hire leaders that demonstrate those same values.

It can be tough to gauge those characteristics, but so far, my batting average is pretty good.