The Role of Data Clean Rooms in Travel & Hospitality: Privacy-First Personalization at Scale

As the travel, hospitality, and dining industries accelerate their digital transformation, the need to deliver highly personalized customer experiences has never been greater. Yet, this imperative collides with a rapidly evolving privacy landscape and the deprecation of third-party cookies, creating a new set of challenges for brands seeking to unify data, collaborate with partners, and maintain regulatory compliance. Enter the data clean room: a powerful enabler for privacy-first personalization at scale.

What Are Data Clean Rooms?

Data clean rooms are secure, privacy-protected environments that allow multiple parties—such as brands, publishers, and technology partners—to collaborate on data without exposing personally identifiable information (PII) or violating privacy regulations. Within a clean room, brands can match, analyze, and enrich first-party data with that of partners, unlocking new insights and targeting opportunities while ensuring that raw data never leaves its original environment.

Unlike traditional data sharing, clean rooms use advanced privacy techniques—such as encryption, differential privacy, and permission-based queries—to ensure that only aggregated, anonymized results are accessible. This approach is essential in a world where signal loss (from cookie deprecation, IP masking, and stricter consent requirements) is the new normal.

Why Data Clean Rooms Matter in a Cookie-less World

The deprecation of third-party cookies and tightening privacy regulations (GDPR, CCPA, and others) have fundamentally changed how travel and hospitality brands can recognize, target, and measure customers across channels. Traditional methods of audience activation, measurement, and attribution are breaking down, leading to wasted media spend and missed opportunities for personalization.

Data clean rooms address these challenges by enabling:

Secure Data Collaboration: Brands can safely collaborate with partners (such as airlines, hotels, OTAs, and dining brands) to enrich customer profiles, suppress paid media to existing loyalty members, and build cross-brand experiences—all without exposing sensitive data.
Unified First-Party Data: Clean rooms facilitate the unification of disparate first-party data sources, creating a single source of truth for identity resolution and customer insights.
Privacy-First Personalization: By leveraging privacy-enhancing technologies, brands can deliver relevant, personalized experiences while maintaining compliance and customer trust.
Advanced Measurement and Attribution: Clean rooms enable more accurate measurement of media effectiveness, incrementality, and ROI by securely joining exposure and conversion data across platforms.

Practical Use Cases for Travel, Hospitality, and Dining Brands

Data clean rooms are already transforming how leading brands approach personalization and measurement. Here are some high-impact use cases:

Suppression of Paid Media to Existing Loyalty Members: Research shows that 77% of travel brands unknowingly target their own loyalty members with paid media, wasting up to 27% of acquisition budgets. Clean rooms allow brands to securely match loyalty lists with media platforms, suppressing ads to known customers and reallocating spend to true prospects.
Cross-Brand Collaboration: Travel and hospitality brands can partner with airlines, hotels, and dining establishments to create joint offers, unified loyalty experiences, or cross-sell opportunities. Clean rooms enable these collaborations without sharing raw customer data, protecting privacy and competitive interests.
Privacy-Safe Audience Enrichment: By joining first-party data with trusted partners (such as publishers or data providers), brands can enrich customer profiles with additional attributes—such as travel intent, dining preferences, or lifestyle indicators—fueling more relevant segmentation and targeting.
Incrementality and ROI Measurement: Clean rooms make it possible to conduct robust A/B testing, lift studies, and multi-touch attribution across walled gardens and media networks, providing a holistic view of marketing effectiveness while respecting user privacy.

How Publicis Sapient and Its Partners Enable Privacy-First Personalization

Publicis Sapient is at the forefront of helping travel, hospitality, and dining brands harness the power of data clean rooms. Through strategic partnerships with technology leaders such as Salesforce, AWS, and Epsilon, we deliver end-to-end solutions that unify data, enable secure collaboration, and drive measurable business outcomes.

Salesforce Data Cloud and Epsilon Identity Essentials: By integrating Salesforce’s customer data platform with Epsilon’s advanced identity resolution, brands can unify fragmented customer records, enrich profiles with hundreds of attributes, and activate privacy-safe audiences across channels. This enables real-time suppression, targeting, and measurement—reducing wasted spend and improving customer experience.
AWS Clean Rooms: AWS provides scalable, secure clean room infrastructure that allows brands to collaborate with partners, publishers, and media networks. This enables advanced use cases such as cross-brand audience building, joint measurement, and privacy-compliant data enrichment.
Unified Audience Accelerator: Publicis Sapient has developed accelerators that streamline the process of matching, enriching, and activating audiences across platforms—helping brands realize value from clean room investments faster.

Our approach is grounded in deep industry expertise, robust data governance, and a commitment to privacy and compliance. We help clients prioritize use cases, design scalable architectures, and orchestrate cross-functional teams to deliver incremental value—often in as little as three to five months.

Looking Ahead: The Future of Privacy-First Personalization

As the digital landscape continues to evolve, data clean rooms will become an essential component of the travel and hospitality data stack. Brands that invest in these capabilities will be able to:

Reduce customer acquisition costs by up to 23% through better identity resolution and media suppression
Unlock new revenue streams via cross-brand partnerships and audience monetization
Deliver more relevant, personalized experiences that build loyalty and trust
Maintain compliance with global privacy regulations and adapt to future changes