How Avanti West Coast, Purple and Monetate made the onboard WiFi portal a personalised, revenue-relevant channel.
Avanti had already proven the value of personalisation on its website, where targeted prompts to join Club Avanti helped significantly grow its contactable customer base, reaching audiences other channels could not.
The onboard WiFi portal was a natural next channel. Every traveller who connects passes through it, making it one of the highest-reach touchpoints in the onboard experience. Until now, though, it showed everyone the same generic screen, whether they were a loyal Club Avanti member or had never heard of the scheme. The opportunity all three partners saw was to turn that captive moment into something relevant, without adding cost or risk to a live, business-critical service.
Each party brings something the others rely on:
Purple’s portal runs across 895 access points covering 80 trains and 23 stations, handling an average of 1.3 million logins a month from around 400,000 unique users. That is close to 16 million opportunities a year to promote and upsell services at the moment someone connects. Engagement holds up too: 85% of users complete authentication, around 15% above the benchmark for captive portals.
Monetate’s technology was added to Purple’s onboard portal through a single, lightweight tag. It only changes the page when a traveller qualifies for an experience, so there is no impact on the WiFi service itself.
From there, Avanti can tailor what each traveller sees. Members and non-members are recognised and shown different, relevant experiences, all handled in a privacy-conscious way, without personal details being passed between systems.
“Onboard WiFi catches people at the moment they’ve settled in and are actually receptive, but most sign-in screens still show everyone the same thing. We built ours to carry someone else’s personalisation, so Monetate could plug straight in and Avanti could start rewarding the travellers who matter most. It moves the screen beyond connectivity, and it adds nothing to the time it takes to get online.”
Every connected traveller now sees the Club Avanti one-millionth sign-up competition. Next, Avanti will prompt non-members to join, remind members to redeem unused benefits, tailor rewards to travel frequency and capture missing contact preferences.
