Personalized Marketing in the Big Data Era: Ctrip’s Experience

On January 22 in Shanghai, at the inaugural Travel Day (TDAY) organized by Global Travel News, Ctrip’s Senior Vice President of Technology and Chief Architect Eric Ye presented Ctrip’s experience in “Personalized Marketing in the Big Data Era”. He described how cross‑screen data processing and real‑time data APIs, combined with a data‑model training platform, allow Ctrip to predict user behavior and deliver personalized recommendations on web pages and EDMs before travel, increasing open rates and conversion.

Ctrip’s call‑center employs over ten thousand staff, and interestingly this traditionally oriented department also leverages big‑data technology to implement an IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system that predicts call intent in real time. Although the current accuracy is about 30%, Eric noted that big‑data applications have reduced average call‑answer time from 8.2 seconds to 2 seconds and shortened average service duration from two minutes to one minute. Given that Ctrip handles 360,000 calls per day, the impact on revenue growth and cost control is substantial.

Balancing openness with confidentiality, Eric showed a blurred map illustrating the distribution of travel propensity across Chinese cities derived from big‑data analysis. Despite the mosaic effect, the slide was recognized as the “dryest dry goods” of the session, prompting the director of Alibaba Travel, Wu Lijun, to comment, “We need to learn from this.”

Eric also revealed that Ctrip previously attempted to analyze and predict business‑travel users, but the results were less effective than for leisure travelers due to smaller sample sizes and constraints such as corporate policies and managerial approvals.