Resort marketers face special challenges: their products change with each season; they sell to multiple customer segments with radically different interests; weather conditions and other external events can shift demand overnight; guest rooms, restaurant sittings, spa sessions, tee times, and instruction hours are all separate inventories that must be orchestrated to optimize aggregate yield. It’s clear that customer data plays a big role in meeting these challenges yet customer data itself is scattered between different systems that don’t communicate with each other.

Customer Data Platforms can’t control the weather (yet), but they do promise to solve the problem of scattered customer data. That’s an appealing offer but savvy markers will quickly ask the logical next question: how, exactly, will I use a CDP to make money? That’s the all-important one, because perfectly assembled customer data by itself is like a beautiful mountain covered in snow: pretty to look at but unproductive until someone invests in the roads, lodges, lifts and trails needed to attract paying customers.