The Power of You: Launch of Homepage Personalization at AirAsia.com [Part 1 of 3]
More than 50 million passengers fly with AirAsia every year. Our website airasia.com receives every day at least 2 million unique active users who interact with us at various touchpoints and leave a trail of data points that tells us the story of who they are, what they want, when they want it and why they want it. And now, we are listening.
Till now, www.airasia.com appeared the same for everyone — you, me, the globe-trotting consultant, the mother of three who is planning a get-together, and for everyone else. However, everyone is unique and every customer who visits our website has unique needs and preferences. The new and improved Airasia.com will now know what you want and show you exactly what you are looking for.
AirAsia.com offers much more than flights — as ASEAN’s fastest growing travel and lifestyle platform, we now also offer hotels, activities, deals, food, groceries and even content.
Using bleeding-edge machine learning technologies like gradient boosting machines implemented on top of data accumulated from the decades of relationships that our customers have with us, we are now able to predict what our users would most likely be interested in. And by marrying this intent with the desired business outcome, we will render them their own unique homepage experience. The smarter AirAsia.com experience means that no two people will potentially see the exact same website given that it would be personalized at an individual level.
The machine learning engine builds predictions based on the rich data that we have on user behavior, purchase sequence and context, collected from our database of the 75 million customers whom we have served over decades.
This means, for example, that if the machine learning engine believes you are more likely to buy hotels as compared to activities based on your purchase history, the website will then display the hotels carousel before the activities one.
And this is just the beginning. As we speak, the team is already working blazingly fast towards the next phase of personalization. Hint: Seamless integration with over 15 product lines and real-time data crunching. In the next phase, not only will the website show you the specific activity, hotel, etc. that you might be most interested in, it will also re-personalize the homepage for you every time you come back to it, even within the same session.
This introduction is Part 1 of a 3-part series on the AirAsia.com personalization engine. Stay tuned for Part 2, which will delve further into the inner workings of our personalization engine.
