TUI hands data task to Experian

Travel group TUI UK is creating a more complete and accurate marketing database by creating a single customer view across its entire brand portfolio, bringing together more than 40 million customer records.
Experian has been appointed to develop the programme, which will enable TUI to put its customers at the very heart of its business to drive more relevant communications across multiple channels.
Parent group TUI Travel is one the world’s leading leisure travel companies, operating in over 180 countries with more than 30 million customers in 31 key source markets. In the UK, its brands include Thomson and First Choice.
Experian has been tasked with working alongside TUI UK’s CRM partner, Creatormail, to deliver the SCV service that brings together two different legacy systems to create a more complete and accurate view of each customer and their interactions with TUI UK brands over a number of years.
Experian will use its suite of data quality, matching and consolidation tools to enable duplicates to be accurately identified within the database. The tools provide each record with a unique personal identifier, which then allows a master record to be created for each individual customer.
Recent research conducted by the data giant revealed that while 72% of UK businesses recognise the competitive advantage of using data and insight, only 16% have a true SCV in place.
Louise Kendall, TUI UK & Ireland business lead for customer data management, commented: “Our challenge was to create an accurate view of all of our customers across our UK mainstream travel brands, bringing together several systems and customer interactions over many years.
“Our incumbent CRM partner was selected to build the SCV, and after extensive research and reviewing the best of breed products and services in the market, we selected Experian’s Link and Unify products to integrate into our build to provide us with the customer centricity that we were missing. We’re confident that we have selected the strongest products to help us enhance our customer data capabilities.”