Transavia's Personalization Takes Flight with Snowplow

Background

Transavia is one of the fastest growing low-cost airlines in Europe. Key to its success is its relentless pursuit of enhancing its customer experience and marketing capabilities. The company prides itself on customer-centric communication, aiming to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time across multiple channels including email, website, app, and paid media. 

Transavia measures its success through several business objectives including: 

• Passenger Experience Index
• Net Promoter Score
• Revenue
• Share of wallet
• Customer loyalty 

Originally, the airline had a fragmented data infrastructure. It had multiple disconnected tools collecting duplicate data from its website, with each solution maintaining its own business logic. As a result, this setup created inefficiencies and hampered visibility across the customer journey. But most critically, Transavia’s existing tools lacked mobile app integration capabilities, causing the company to miss a vital touchpoint in the customer journey. 

To resolve these issues, Transavia connected with data consultancy Digital Power to conduct a complete audit of its data infrastructure. 

The assessment, led by Max Meijer (Product Owner of Marketing Automation at Transavia) and Wouter Stolk (Senior Data Engineer at Digital Power), concluded that Transavia needed a unified approach to customer data—one that would speed up the implementation of personalization use cases while reducing complexity and costs. Here’s how Transavia’s journey to Snowplow unfolded. 

Challenges

Digital Power’s review of Transavia’s data infrastructure uncovered several limitations with the company’s existing DIY-style data pipeline. These limitations were preventing the airline from achieving its customer-centric marketing ambitions. 

Fragmented DIY Data Pipeline

Firstly, Transavia’s data stack had evolved into a complex web of overlapping tools. But what made this setup problematic was that each tool was collecting its own set of data from the website. As Digital Power’s Wouter Stolk explained: 

“For quite a while, Transavia's approach was that whenever a system lacked a certain piece of functionality, we would simply add another tool alongside it—one that could collect data, process it, and send it to one of the destinations.”
Wouter Stolk, Senior Data Engineer, Digital Power

Over time, more tools were added, creating a fragmented tech stack. This left Transavia with no choice but to stand up a dedicated team of engineers to maintain the setup, creating time-to-market delays particularly for marketing initiatives. It also became challenging for the engineering teams to integrate new data sources and adapt to business requirements. 

Low Data Quality & Usability

The company’s fragmented infrastructure increased the risk of data inconsistencies and errors. This was due to the team having to replicate business logic across multiple systems. For example, the team had to define what constituted a “conversion” within each separate tool. And a lack of appropriate developer tooling for validation and debugging meant engineers were spending too much time manually addressing data quality issues. 

Poor Data Governance

Data governance also became a headache for Transavia. With numerous tools collecting, processing, and sharing data, the team struggled to maintain clear data ownership, auditability, and proper access controls. As Max Meijer, Product Owner of Marketing Automation at Transavia summarized: 

"It was really hard to have control over our data."
Max Meijer, Product Owner of Marketing Automation, Transavia

Mobile App Integration Gap

One of the biggest issues for Transavia was its inability to integrate its mobile app into its marketing ecosystem. Stolk expanded on this problem:  

"So all of the tools that Transavia had within the previous landscape were lacking support for integration with the mobile app. That's a truly critical problem for the company because the mobile app is a very important piece of someone's customer experience with Transavia."
Wouter Stolk, Senior Data Engineer, Digital Power

Consequently, it became almost impossible for Transavia to gain a unified view of its customers across all touchpoints. This limited view also made it challenging to deliver a consistent personalized experience across web and mobile. 

Cost and Complexity Issues

With so many tools in place, licensing costs were high and operations were complex. Each system required specialized knowledge to maintain, leaving Transavia dependent on niche expertise. Max estimated the company was spending 40% more on licenses when compared to a more efficient architecture. 

Reactive Problem Resolution

Transavia’s complex data stack also made it difficult to monitor the health of its marketing use cases. Wouter Stolk from Digital Power shared an example:

“We had a situation where a very valuable use case went down for a month, and only after one of the marketers came to notify us of the decreasing numbers, we would find out that the use case was down.”
Wouter Stolk, Senior Data Engineer, Digital Power

Max Meijer expanded on this issue: 

 “Our tech stack was really difficult to debug and keep running . We had no monitoring capabilities, which made it very complex, and we didn't include the app at all.”
Max Meijer, Product Owner of Marketing Automation, Transavia

To meet its aim of delivering a personalized customer experience, Transavia undertook a complete rethink of its approach to customer data management. 

Solution

The review concluded that a composable Customer Data Platform (CDP) would be the most effective approach to replace Transavia’s fragmented DIY pipeline. This setup involves bringing together best-of-breed tools to each component of Transavia’s infrastructure, rather than relying on a single monolithic system. 

Composable CDP Architecture

Working with Digital Power, Transavia implemented its composable CDP with Snowplow at its core for data collection, Databricks for processing and storage, and a reverse ETL tool for activation. 

Wouter Stolk explained: 

"The concept is to consolidate on a select set of tools and have the best-of-breed tool for each piece of the puzzle. By choosing the best-of-breed tool for each component, we've created enough flexibility to build any use case we want, while also enabling more centralized data collection and data processing."
Wouter Stolk, Senior Data Engineer, Digital Power

With the new approach, Transavia was able to reduce tool overlap while expanding functionality. The composable nature of the solution meant the Transavia team could maintain, upgrade, or replace each component independently without disrupting the entire ecosystem. 

Unified Data Collection with Snowplow

Snowplow is a critical component of the new architecture, providing Transavia with a unified data collection layer across web and mobile. As Stolk noted: 

"We no longer have 20 different scripts collecting data on the website, but we now primarily use Snowplow to collect data client side.”
Wouter Stolk, Senior Data Engineer, Digital Power

By having a centralized approach to behavioral data collection, Transavia eliminated data duplication issues. It also gained a consistent and structured way to capture data across all customer touchpoints. In addition, Snowplow’s approach to data quality and schema enforcement ensured all collected data adhered to defined standards, improving data reliability. 

Centralized Processing in Databricks

Databricks is Transavia’s central data lakehouse. The airline now uses Databricks to centralize its business logic in one location rather than replicating it across multiple systems—eliminating inconsistencies and streamlining ongoing maintenance. Max Meijer explained: 

"Overall, we saw a 10% increase in retargeting match rates, just by having a much better overview of our customers and what they do on web and app. We achieved a five to 10% increase in recognition rate on web and app, similar to the retargeting improvement. We now know and see more customers and recognize more customers when we have a complete view of their activity."
Max Meijer, Product Owner of Marketing Automation, Transavia

With this integrated architecture, Transavia now has a full feedback loop where responses to personalized messaging can be captured and used to refine targeting models, enhancing customer recognition across channels. 

Enhanced Governance and Monitoring

Transavia’s new composable CDP has also improved the company’s data governance. By having a unified data collection strategy and centralized processing, the airline has gained complete visibility into its data flows throughout the system. As Max shared: 

"Now with this landscape, we have the ability to truly control our data and meet all the GDPR requirements and regulations that are needed in this day and age."
Max Meijer, Product Owner of Marketing Automation, Transavia

The implementation included proactive monitoring capabilities. As a result, Transavia has eliminated the extended downtime previously experienced when use cases failed, ensuring business continuity and maintaining the integrity of its personalization efforts. 

Flight Load Factor Use Case Implementation

To test the effectiveness of the new composable CDP, Transavia and Digital Power reimplemented a personalization use case for flight load factor optimization. This use case works by combining customer behavioral data with flight information to target customers with personalized offers for underperforming flights. Max explained: 

"The objective of the use case was to include not just the context of the customer, but also the context of Transavia. On our side, it was a combination of the load factor and the deviation from that load factor. The primary goal was, of course, filling those underperforming flights with our marketing efforts—being more efficient with our marketing spend by targeting the flights that really need the promotional push."
Max Meijer, Product Owner of Marketing Automation, Transavia

Max further described the practical implementation: 

"Based on the retargeting data we have, we can share specific offers with our customers for particular destinations. We include pricing and seat availability information, all based on the customer's previous searches and bookings, but also based on Transavia's context. We consider: does this flight really need a promotional push?"
Max Meijer, Product Owner of Marketing Automation, Transavia

Thanks to the new architecture, the use case was implemented across multiple channels—paid channels in Google and Meta, personalized blocks in email newsletters, and targeted recommendations on both website and app. 

On the previous data architecture, the use case took approximately six months to build. With Snowplow, Databricks, and their reverse ETL tool composable CDP, it took just one month. 

The composable architecture provided Transavia with the flexibility to replace or extend individual components as needed, ensuring its marketing technology would remain agile and adaptable to changing requirements. 

Snowplow’s behavioral data collection capabilities also eliminated the quality and governance issues inherent in Transavia’s previous DIY pipeline, giving the airline the ability to deliver personalized experiences that truly connect with customers, 

Results

Transavia’s composable CDP, with Snowplow at its core, has delivered substantial business value—from a dramatic improvement in personalization to a reduction in operational costs.

Business Impact

With its new data setup, Transavia generated a €27 million incremental increase in flight revenue across all channels, including an €18 million lift on its website from personalized flight recommendations alone. 

The personalized experiences drove measurable improvements in engagement, with a 5% uplift in conversion for email newsletter blocks and a 4% uplift in conversion rates via the app. As Max reported: 

"Overall, we saw a €27 million incremental increase in flight revenue just by adding those personalization elements. We also achieved a 7% more efficient spend on our paid media, which resulted in an increase in our ROAS and a decrease in our cost per acquisition."
Max Meijer, Product Owner of Marketing Automation, Transavia

Operational Efficiency

Transavia’s new architecture also delivered significant operational benefits. License costs were reduced by 40% and the airline gained an improved overview of its marketing technology landscape. 

Implementation speed accelerated by 400%, with use cases now deployed in weeks rather rather than months. And the proactive monitoring capabilities removed the extended downtime previously experienced. 

Customer Experience Improvements

The enhanced personalization capabilities have dramatically improved Transavia’s customer satisfaction. Net Promoter Scores (NPS)  have increased by 5-10% on personalized touchpoints. Customer recognition has also improved, with a 10% increase in retargeting match rates and a 5-10% increase in recognition rate on web and app.

The ultimate validation came through a 1.2% increase in returning customers booking additional flights, demonstrating the business value of offering relevant, personalized experiences across all customer touchpoints.

By replacing its fragmented data pipeline with Snowplow as part of a composable CDP, Transavia has completely transformed its marketing capabilities while creating measurable value for its business. 

Looking Ahead

With its new composable CDP powered by Snowplow, Transavia is now focused on expanding its personalization capabilities across more touchpoints in the customer journey. Max explained: 

"Next, we're expanding the ancillary recommendations. For customers who are in the booking process, we'll recommend the right upsell options, which can be both first-party and third-party products. I think there's quite a lot to gain there, especially on our website and app, since we didn't include the app at all in our previous personalization use cases. We're really curious to see what the results will be when we add these new use cases."
Max Meijer, Product Owner of Marketing Automation, Transavia

The flexible composable architecture enables Transavia to extend its platform as new requirements emerge. As Digital Power's Wouter Stolk noted: 

“If necessary, we can also extend the platform—for example, if we wanted to implement more advanced entity resolution through a graph database. We could easily add a graph database to the ecosystem because everything we do is running within Transavia’s cloud provider, which is Azure.”
Wouter Stolk, Senior Data Engineer, Digital Power

After moving from its fragmented DIY data pipeline, Transavia now has a modular, composable CDP centered on Snowplow’s customer data infrastructure. It has created a foundation for continuous innovation in personalization. And the airline can make better use of its customer behavioral data to drive both enhanced customer experiences and significant business value—all while maintaining the flexibility to adapt to changing market requirements. 

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