As travelers research and dream about potential trips, they send countless signals about their destination interests, booking patterns, preferred travel dates, and more. Marketers need to interpret this data to identify audiences with high booking potential, optimize their ad spend, and create seamless customer journeys, all while working with limited resources and tight budgets.

To support travel marketers throughout the customer life cycle, Sojern worked with Google Cloud to implement Vertex AI , a fully managed ML platform that streamlines audience creation and enhances customer experience tools. This infrastructure underpins the Sojern Traveler Ecosystem, a proprietary database powered by billions of real-time traveler intent signals.

"Using this data, we create real-time travel audiences and send those audiences to our customers," Bryant says. "With up-to-date audiences in hand, our customers can increase the accuracy and effectiveness of their programmatic campaigns."

With Vertex AI, Sojern can build, retrain, and host ML models daily, unlocking sharp and timely predictive insights into audience targeting. Through these models, Sojern's platform identifies travelers who share traits with a brand's existing high-value customers and predicts their likelihood to book, helping brands maximize their marketing dollars.

"Vertex AI allows us to scale and meet the demands of complex advertising campaigns," Bryant explains. "By automating predictive audience creation and targeting, we ensure maximum impact for our customers with minimal effort."

Google Cloud has given Sojern the versatility to use an enterprise-grade ML platform with advanced generative AI capabilities and built-in security. As Bryant explains, "Within a single platform, we can select the AI/ML capability that suits the use case, scale to meet client needs in a cost-effective way, and feel confident that our data and our clients' data are both safe."

For example, through Vertex AI, the team can train and host targeting models at scale, build consumer-facing AI products on top of Gemini, and accelerate business operations with Agentspace .

By automating these processes, Sojern has reduced the time required to generate traveler audiences from two weeks of manual data scientist effort to less than two days of machine automation.

With Google Cloud as the backbone of its platform, Sojern has the capacity to generate over 6,000 predictions per second — more than 500 million daily — and drive measurable improvements in campaign performance. On average, Sojern clients see a 20-50% improvement in cost-per-acquisition. Meanwhile, the company has streamlined guest engagement by deploying Reputation Manager to 700 hotels globally.

Sojern continues to explore new ways to drive success for travel marketers using Google Cloud. The company aims to integrate even more advanced AI-driven capabilities into its platform to enhance ad optimization and guest engagement tools.