How Secret Escapes Transformed the Travel Booking Experience with Snowplow, AWS, and Snowflake
"Snowplow gave us what we needed: a single source of truth. We now have trusted data landing directly into our warehouse, complete with sanity checks and enrichments that help us better understand user behavior."
ROBIN PATEL, HEAD OF DATA AND ANALYTICS ENGINEERING, SECRET ESCAPES
Secret Escapes, a travel discount website, was facing some challenges that many digital marketers are all too familiar with: fragmented data, siloed insights, and legacy systems that couldn't keep pace with their ambitious personalization goals. Recently, during a webinar, key stakeholders from Secret Escapes, AWS, Snowflake, and Snowplow discussed how brands are leveraging modern data platforms to overcome these hurdles and create a scalable foundation for the future. This post takes a closer look at how Secret Escapes transformed its data strategy by collaborating with Snowplow, AWS, and Snowflake, highlighting both the challenges they faced and the successes they achieved.
Let’s dive in.
Understanding the Challenges with Legacy Systems
Secret Escapes had been relying on Google Analytics (GA) for user behavior insights, but like many legacy analytics tools, GA fell short in several key areas. These platforms often lack the ability to provide granular, event-level data, which makes it challenging to truly understand user behavior. Additionally, they tend to operate as 'black boxes,' limiting the customization of data collection and forcing businesses to work within pre-set metrics. Over time, Secret Escapes tried to compensate for GA's limitations by adding various internal trackers, but these workarounds resulted in a fragmented view of the customer journey. During the webinar, Robin Patel from Secret Escapes explained: "We were getting a split understanding of how people were actually using our applications, leading to conflicting narratives and making it difficult to draw meaningful, data-driven decisions."
This fragmented approach was further complicated by an evolving regulatory landscape. Privacy regulations and the decline of third-party cookies meant Secret Escapes had to rethink its entire data infrastructure.
Implementing a Best-in-breed Stack with Snowplow, AWS, and Snowflake
The decision to implement Snowplow’s customer data infrastructure, combined with Snowflake as their data platform and AWS as their cloud services provider, was a pivotal moment for Secret Escapes. This move led to a 15% increase in customer engagement and a 20% improvement in marketing campaign efficiency within the first six months.
With this stack, Secret Escapes saw a foundational shift. They experienced a 25% reduction in data processing time, allowing the marketing team to act on insights more quickly. By centralizing first-party data in Snowflake, they were able to ensure consistency, reliability, and control—key factors for driving personalized marketing and business decisions. Snowplow's raw event-level data gave them the flexibility they needed to tailor insights across different use cases.
Real-Time Personalization: Moving Beyond Basic Understanding of Users to Building 1:1 Relationships
One of Secret Escapes' biggest goals was to enable real-time personalization—something that seemed unattainable with their old setup. But with Snowplow, AWS and Snowflake in place, personalization became possible on multiple levels. As Robin noted: "We're constantly evolving how we personalize content—showing you relevant information faster, giving you a more connected experience. Hyper-personalization, where we tailor each interaction to the individual, is definitely on our radar now."
Whether it's showing different content to a user who prefers sunny holidays during winter or providing personalized recommendations, this level of personalization has significantly boosted engagement. The ability to provide tailored experiences across channels—from emails to on-site content—has strengthened Secret Escapes' connection with customers. This shift also contributed to a 30% uplift in conversion rates for personalized campaigns.
Privacy and First-Party Data: A New Standard
Another cornerstone of Secret Escapes' success has been their shift to quality, trusted first-party data. Patel emphasized, "The trust we have in our first-party data allows us to make confident decisions without worrying about compliance issues. We designed our architecture with privacy in mind from the very beginning."
Franck Georget, Partner Strategy Lead from AWS, added that privacy concerns, coupled with increasingly complex customer journeys, have made strong first-party data strategies more critical than ever. He highlighted AWS's key role in transforming today's businesses saying, “With AWS, we provide the infrastructure that allows businesses to scale globally with unmatched reliability, while Snowflake offers the analytics tools that help make sense of all that data. Together, we create a powerful foundation for companies like Secret Escapes to innovate.” This "zero data movement" approach means Secret Escapes keeps data securely in one place, reducing latency and avoiding costly data duplication—all while maintaining complete control over customer information.
A Flexible, Future-Proof Tech Stack
John Bourous, Senior Partner Marketer from Snowplow, highlighted the advantages of using composable solutions like Snowplow and Snowflake over traditional, packaged analytics tools. "The limitations of traditional analytics were in how they locked up data and limited visibility," he said. "With Snowplow, we’re giving ownership back to the business, allowing them to create flexible, first-party data assets that serve multiple purposes."
This flexibility has been instrumental in future-proofing Secret Escapes' marketing strategies, ensuring they can scale as their needs change. Integrate Snowplow data with other services—whether for email personalization, CRM, or intelligent recommendations—has allowed Secret Escapes to iterate and innovate continuously.
AI-Driven Insights and Personalization: The Next Frontier
Artificial intelligence plays an increasingly pivotal role in transforming how Secret Escapes utilizes data. During the webinar, Robin Patel touched on how AI capabilities enhance their data-driven approach: "AI is helping us take personalization to another level by allowing us to interpret customer signals in real-time, which was previously impossible." By leveraging AI models integrated with their Snowplow behavioral data, Secret Escapes aims to deliver personalized content and predictive insights that anticipate customer needs.
Franck Georget also mentioned the role of AI, saying, "AI is accelerating what we're able to achieve with customer experience, making it more efficient and targeted. By combining the scale and reliability of AWS with the analytics power of Snowflake and Snowplow, we are enabling businesses to deliver hyper-relevant experiences at the right time."
John Bourous added, "AI isn’t just a buzzword here—it’s about using these behavioral insights effectively to drive better engagement and make smarter decisions. As Secret Escapes continues to evolve, AI will be crucial in scaling personalization efforts, helping the brand stay ahead in a competitive market."
Key Takeaways
The journey Secret Escapes embarked on—migrating from legacy systems to an integrated, first-party data stack—has provided them with a more reliable, flexible, and future-proof data strategy. By leveraging Snowplow, AWS, and Snowflake, they've built a foundation that enhances personalization and customer engagement and aligns with modern privacy standards. Adopting AI will push their data strategy even further, enabling real-time, hyper-personalized experiences that drive engagement and business growth.
For a more detailed look into how Secret Escapes achieved these results, check out the full Secret Escapes case study.