Overview
All Nippon Airways (ANA) has long been recognised for its service excellence, consistently ranking among the world’s top airlines and earning 5-Star status for over a decade. Anchored in the Japanese philosophy of omotenashi—thoughtful, anticipatory hospitality—the airline is now re-imagining how that spirit translates into the digital age. By leveraging real-time data and unified customer profiles, ANA is moving beyond operational efficiency to deliver connected, meaningful engagements that drive both loyalty and revenue.
The Challenge
Today’s travellers don’t just expect to get from A to B—they expect connection, personal relevance and responsiveness across every stage of travel. For ANA’s marketing and customer experience teams, this shift introduced several key challenges:
- Transitioning from manual, fragmented systems to truly connected, real-time insights and actions.
- Scaling personalised engagements across bookings, loyalty programmes, mobile apps and airport systems without losing the human touch of omotenashi.
- Turning every digital interaction—from browsing to boarding—into an opportunity to engage, convert, and build loyalty in real time.
The Solution
ANA selected Tealium’s real-time data orchestration platform as the foundation to unify customer data, eliminate silos, and power personalised, cross-channel experiences. Key pillars of the solution include:
- Unified Traveller Identity: Consolidating data across bookings, loyalty, mobile and airport systems so ANA can recognise a passenger’s situation immediately and act accordingly.
- Real-Time Engagement at Scale: Enabling real-time triggers such as flight-delay alerts, re-booking offers, lounge invitations, or upgrade propositions based on live signals.
- Channel-agnostic Activation: Delivering relevant offers and communications across mobile, email, app, airport touch-points and loyalty channels.
- Empowered Teams: Marketing, loyalty and operations teams can now build, test and launch campaigns faster, with less reliance on engineering resources.
Key Outcomes
- Faster Campaign Activation: What once took weeks now launches in days—bringing agility to personalisation and experimentation.
- Higher Conversion Rates: Tailored ancillary and upgrade offers based on real-time traveller signals delivered measurable lift in conversions.
- Improved Retention & Loyalty: By proactively responding to disruptions and individual traveller context, ANA strengthened customer trust and loyalty.
- Brand Consistency at Every Moment: From digital touch points to in-flight service, every interaction now reflects ANA’s high standards and hospitality ethos.
Why Tealium?
Through its partnership with Tealium, ANA gained a flexible, scalable platform that supports real-time data collection, identity resolution and cross-channel activation—all while safeguarding data quality and privacy. The platform enables ANA to maintain the warmth and attentiveness of its heritage service, now powered by data-driven intelligence.
Lessons for Travel Marketers
- Start with the Traveller, Not the Channel: Focus on emotional and behavioural journeys before designing channel-specific tactics.
- Invest in Real-Time Capabilities: Relevance fades in seconds—today’s personalisation must respond instantly.
- Balance Revenue with Relationships: Combine conversion metrics with loyalty and satisfaction indicators to optimise for lifetime value.
- Humanise Automation: Let technology facilitate empathy at scale—but don’t replace the human element entirely.
Conclusion: Redefining Loyalty Through Data
ANA’s transformation demonstrates that heritage hospitality and modern data-driven engagement can go hand-in-hand. By leveraging Tealium’s real-time data orchestration platform, ANA turned insight into action and delivered personalised experiences that resonate emotionally and commercially. The future of loyalty in travel isn’t just about points or offers—it’s about truly understanding each traveller, responding in the moment, and building trust through meaningful engagement.
For travel marketers: Real-time personalisation isn’t just a strategy—it’s a service standard.
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