Bloomreach, a personalised customer engagement AI company, has launched an external segments feature that brings zero-copy activation to brands on any data platform. It lets marketers import audiences built in any data warehouse, customer data platform, or reverse ETL tool as ready-to-use segments, with no rebuilding or data transfer. Bloomreach's AI, Loomi, then decides the best action for each customer interaction and delivers it across more than 17 channels. Engagement and outcome data flows back to the brand's own platform. "Bloomreach is open by design, built for a composable world," said Raj De Datta, chief executive officer and co-founder. Any system that can call the open API can push audiences. Bloomreach serves more than 1,400 brands, including American Eagle, Sonepar, and Pandora.

Real-Time personalization: how airlines are turning browsers into bookers. Travel brands are using real-time personalization to convert preference data into loyalty, moving away from broad discounting strategies. Real-time personalization has moved to the top of the agenda for airlines, hotels, and tour operators looking to convert long consideration cycles into confirmed bookings, without defaulting to the broad discounts that erode margins and commoditise brands. Book Flights That was the central message at a Skift Global Forum 2026 executive roundtable, presented by Bloomreach, where Graham Smith, Bloomreach's strategic account executive for enterprise, joined travel industry leaders to explore how timely, relevant engagement can strengthen loyalty and make preference data visible to the traveller who shared it. Hire Brand Experts Why discounting alone is not enough. According to Skift, participants at the roundtable acknowledged that when geopolitical tensions, climate events, or other unforeseen disruptions hit demand, broad discounts may retain customers in the short term. The warning, however, was clear: brands that rely on discounting alone risk training travellers to wait for the lowest price rather than choosing on the basis of loyalty or preference. Store Big Data Personalization offers a different route. Understand what matters to each traveller, identify where that person drops out of the booking journey, and deliver a relevant reason to stay. "I think it starts by proving to them that you know their preferences and understand how they engage," Smith told the roundtable, as reported by Skift. The long consideration cycle problem. One of the sharpest practical challenges in travel is the gap between a first browse and an actual booking. "Someone could browse on your site, but may not plan to stay for another six months or eight months," Smith said. A returning guest who receives messages that ignore previous stays, known destinations, or demonstrated interests is a guest who is being pushed toward a competitor. Discover more Plan Vacations Order Custom Gifts Skift reports that Smith pointed to Haven and On the Beach, a UK-based retailer of short- and medium-haul package holidays to Europe, as European businesses already building more connected digital journeys. Many North American travel and hospitality brands, he said, are only beginning to catch up. Track Flights How each part of the value chain uses personalization. Different sectors of the travel industry apply real-time personalization in different ways, and the roundtable explored where each has the most room to move. According to Skift, airlines often focus personalization on pricing, baggage allowances, seats, and priority benefits, yet may still miss details that matter most to individual passengers. Hotels have more room to personalise on the property itself, through service, messaging, dining, and activities. Resorts can use apps or WhatsApp to steer guests toward relevant reservations and excursions during a stay. Tour operators and large travel groups focus more heavily on the booking journey itself. Across all of them, the roundtable agreed that the front-end promise must match the operational product. A sophisticated personalisation campaign cannot rescue an inconsistent or disappointing stay. Grow Your Brand Collecting data without alienating guests. Participants asked how brands can gather traveller preferences without making guests feel interrogated. The answer that emerged was to ask gradually, make participation optional, and show value quickly. Travellers share more when the next message they receive reflects what they have already said. The risk of collecting data without acting on it drew repeated concern. "Companies collecting data should make sure they're putting it to use," Smith said, as Skift reports. "If they're just sitting on that data, that could be more irritating than never asking for it in the first place." Compare CRMs The same principle extends to post-stay engagement. Reviews can identify promoters and detractors, shape the tone of follow-up communications, and support repeat-booking offers tailored to what the guest actually experienced. Cathay Pacific and the high-tech, high-touch balance. Cathay Pacific offers one of the most detailed public accounts of how an airline is trying to make this balance work in practice. Ahead of his keynote at the APEX FTE EXPO in Singapore on 18 and 19 November 2026, Aldric Chau, Regional General Manager for Southeast Asia and Oceania at Cathay Pacific, gave Future Travel Experience his clearest statement of the airline's philosophy. "We should not assume that more digital touchpoints automatically mean a better customer experience," Chau said. "Self-service is only useful if it reduces effort for the customer, rather than simply shifting work to the customer." Hire Brand Experts For Chau, the practical test for any new technology comes down to three questions: does it remove work rather than transfer work to the passenger; does it help staff act with better information and less administrative friction; and can it move from a promising pilot into everyday operations across teams and markets? Real-Time personalization in the Operations Centre. Cathay Pacific's approach is not limited to marketing. Future Travel Experience reports that at the airline's Integrated Operations Centre, AI-supported decision tools can consider passenger connections, cargo, crew logistics, and operational constraints together. During Super Typhoon Ragasa, a disruption-recovery optimiser reduced decision time significantly, supporting faster rebooking for thousands of journeys. Book Flights "The value was not a clever model on its own," Chau said. "It was a faster, better-informed operating rhythm with humans still accountable for the decision." That distinction matters. Chau's description of Cathay's "high tech, high touch" approach places human judgement at the centre, using AI to put better options and context in front of the people who must ultimately decide. As The Aviation Hub noted in its coverage of Boeing's Dataliner AI platform, the broader industry is moving in a similar direction: AI as an enabler of faster, better-informed decisions rather than a replacement for operational expertise. You can explore which airlines are investing in these technologies using its Airline Search tool. The bottom line. Real-time personalization is not a single technology or campaign tactic. It is a commitment to using preference data quickly, consistently, and in a way that the traveller can actually feel. The brands that do it well, whether an airline tailoring ancillary offers or a resort steering guests toward relevant excursions via WhatsApp, share one quality: they act on what they learn, rather than warehousing it. Store Big Data The warning from both the Bloomreach roundtable and Cathay Pacific is the same. Collecting data and failing to act on it is worse than not collecting it at all. The front-end promise must match the experience that follows. And however sophisticated the technology, human judgement remains the final accountability. Continue to follow The Aviation Hub for more analysis and insight.

Why do customers leave loyalty programmes? Key takeaways: * Irrelevant offers are the biggest red flag in UK loyalty, and the most common reason shoppers walk away. * Members who feel no different to regular customers are almost twice as likely to leave. * Shoppers want simple, visible value and offers that fit what they buy. Loyalty schemes have never been more popular. Almost every UK shopper belongs to at least one, and most carry several in their wallet or phone. Yet popularity and loyalty are two very different things. More than half of shoppers feel less loyal to retailers than they did three years ago, and more than one in five have stopped shopping somewhere because of its loyalty programme. So why do customers leave loyalty programmes, and what can retailers do about it? To find out, HyperFinity partnered with Eagle Eye and Bloomreach on the Retail Loyalty Index Pulse 2026, a survey of 2,000 UK shoppers about what frustrates them, what keeps them coming back and what finally makes them leave. Their answers point to a clear conclusion. Shoppers haven't lost interest in loyalty. They've lost patience with schemes that don't feel like they were built for them. Membership is easy. Loyalty is earned. Think about how most people use a loyalty scheme today. They scan a card or app at the till, almost without thinking. Then they forget about it until the next shop. Nine in 10 shoppers use their scheme this way on most visits. However, only a third say it makes them genuinely more loyal. That gap matters. A scheme that runs on habit alone holds customers only until a cheaper rival or a better offer appears. For retailers, high sign-up and scan rates can mask a programme that isn't actually changing behaviour. Engagement still pays off, though. Shoppers who use their scheme on every or most visits are nearly twice as likely to say a good programme decides where they shop. The challenge is turning that everyday scan into a genuine reason to choose you over a competitor. Irrelevant offers are the main reason customers leave loyalty programmes. The single biggest red flag in UK loyalty is irrelevant offers, named by more than half of shoppers. It's also the most common reason people give for walking away. Picture a household without a pet receiving dog food vouchers. Or a regular who only ever buys fresh produce being pushed towards frozen ready meals. Each mismatch tells the shopper the same thing: this retailer doesn't really know me. Interestingly, shoppers rarely list personalisation as a reward they want. Yet almost eight in 10 expect their offers to be tailored. In other words, relevance has become a baseline expectation. Customers don't thank you for getting it right, but they certainly notice when you get it wrong. The good news is that the fix rarely requires new data. Shoppers are generally comfortable sharing their information, with personal data requests coming bottom of the red flag list. What they want is to see it used. Most retailers already hold a detailed record of what each customer buys. So the opportunity lies in putting that history to work. Customers who feel ordinary are quicker to leave loyalty programmes. Imagine shopping somewhere every week for years, then receiving exactly the same generic email as someone who signed up yesterday. Six in 10 loyalty members say they've felt no different to a regular customer. As a result, those customers are almost twice as likely to have left a retailer because of its loyalty programme. Recognition doesn't have to be expensive. Member-only prices make the benefit of joining visible every time someone shops. A well-timed surprise also shows that someone has noticed, whether it's a free coffee after a run of visits or a treat on a customer's favourite product. These small moments do more to build loyalty than another round of blanket discounts. Simple value beats clever mechanics. Taken together, the Pulse shows that loyalty is far from broken. Shoppers still use their schemes, share their data and reward retailers who get it right. What they want in return is value they can see, offers that fit what they buy and the sense that their membership counts. The prize for getting this right is significant. Almost two thirds of shoppers say a good loyalty programme often or always decides where they shop. The report sets out six practical ways to get there, from making every offer earn its place to recognising members rather than simply registering them. Every red flag can be fixed, and the retailers who fix them first will earn loyalty that lasts. There's much more in the full report. Download the Retail Loyalty Index Pulse 2026 to find out how rising household costs are reshaping loyalty, how comfortable shoppers really are with AI-powered personalisation, and why younger and older shoppers want very different things from the same programme. You'll also get the complete red and green flag leaderboards and all six fixes. And if you'd like to see how your own programme measures up, get in touch with its team. FAQs.