Industry Insights: 4 Questions With Wunderkind
With digital privacy tightening, identity resolution is becoming essential for travel marketers. Wunderkind’s Ronen Kadosh explains how smarter data strategies can help brands drive direct bookings and build lasting loyalty.
This sponsored content was created in collaboration with a Skift partner.
This edition of “Industry Insights” features an interview with Ronen Kadosh, head of travel and ticketing at Wunderkind, a performance marketing platform.
Kadosh sees identity resolution as a game-changer for travel marketing, helping brands move from broad targeting to real-time, personalized engagement. As travelers expect more meaningful connections, Kadosh shares how Wunderkind’s performance-driven approach helps brands build loyalty and drive results across the entire journey.
Here’s our conversation.
SkiftX: What are the biggest opportunities in the industry right now?
Ronen Kadosh: The biggest opportunity is to capitalize on converting anonymous web traffic into known customers — at scale. It’s something our retail peers do really well. Travel and hospitality brands have some of the largest first-party data sets due to really effective loyalty programs, but most visitors browse anonymously and remain unidentified. This presents a massive opportunity to leverage customer relationship management (CRM) data to drive acquisition and increase lifetime value (LTV).
Tactics like abandonment retargeting are some of the highest-converting marketing touchpoints, but they remain super challenging to scale since it’s so hard to identify site traffic. By focusing on real-time identity resolution, brands can build persistent, cross-session profiles that power better personalization and enable them to retarget far more site abandoners. This could mean thousands of additional direct conversions.
Pair that with AI-driven triggers and dynamic segmentation, and you can deliver timely messages across email, onsite, and paid media — based on real-time behaviors, not guesswork.
The brands that win will not just know who’s booking — they’ll also know who’s browsing, abandoning, and re-engaging. And they’ll use that insight to deliver high-performance experiences across the funnel.
What are the biggest challenges or watch-outs?
The main challenge facing travel brands today is the dominance of online travel agencies (OTAs), which capture significant market share and customer loyalty, often at the expense of direct bookings. Additionally, increasing privacy regulations and the declining reliability of third-party cookies are making traditional digital marketing channels less effective. Travel brands must proactively shift their strategies toward utilizing identity resolution and first-party data to maintain effective engagement with their customers. Navigating this shift effectively requires thoughtful investment in technologies and partnerships that support compliance and deliver genuine customer value.
How does your brand push the industry forward?
Traditionally, it’s been tricky for brands to recognize and reconnect with anonymous website visitors, leading potential guests to book through third-party OTAs. This not only increases acquisition costs but also limits the opportunity to build strong, direct relationships.
Wunderkind tackles this challenge head-on with advanced identity resolution technology, turning anonymous visitors into known, engaged profiles in real-time. This means brands can deliver meaningful, personalized messaging at exactly the right moment, greatly boosting direct bookings. By shifting bookings away from OTAs and into brands’ own channels, we help them capture more owned, direct revenue — ultimately increasing margins and profitability.
By capturing valuable first-party data, we empower travel brands to create exceptional guest experiences, build lasting loyalty, and drive sustainable revenue growth. In short, Wunderkind helps brands transform unknown visitors into known, loyal customers by recognizing up to 10 times more site visitors and enabling them to scale abandonment retargeting to drive brand-direct, incremental bookings.
What’s your secret travel hack?
Less of a hack, more of a tip. Often, when we travel, we all end up eating at the same few restaurants based on what we see online. If you know someone who lives where you’re going, ask them for the authentic recs. When there’s no reliable source, go to the local coffee shop, ask the baristas, the shopkeepers, or the locals for the real recs. It might be a bit out of our comfort zone, but it’s resulted in some of the best meals of my life.
For more information about Wunderkind’s work with travel and hospitality brands, click here.
This content was created collaboratively by Wunderkind and Skift’s branded content studio, SkiftX.
skift.
