“Can’t We Just Use Snowflake?”

In meetings with travel and hospitality leaders, I often hear confidence in cloud Enterprise Data Warehouses (EDWs) such as Snowflake or Amazon Web Services (AWS)'s Redshift—solving every data challenge. 

Yet every conversation uncovers frustrations: runaway compute costs, brittle SQL pipelines, long IT queues to build a dashboard, inability to action on information, and days-old data when guests expect real-time personalization.

Adobe's Customer Journey Analytics (CJA) uniquely resolves these pain points with a purpose-built XDM schema, real-time ingestion, and self-service Analysis Workspace—plus cutting-edge AI Agents like Platform Orchestrator, Data Engineering Agent and Data Insights Agent that automate pipeline creation and surface insights in seconds.

For airlines, restaurants, car rental companies, and hotel brands, this means faster experimentation, centralized metrics governance, and the agility to delight guests at every touchpoint.

A Familiar Conversation in the C-Suite

“Can’t we just build the same dashboards in Snowflake?” echoes in every boardroom I enter.

Executives point to shiny data warehouses, convinced that centralizing clickstreams, CRM records, and POS logs in Redshift or Snowflake will unlock instant insights. Yet requests to spin up new journeys—like modeling mobile-check-in abandonment or cross-property loyalty segments—quickly stall under layers of custom SQL, costly compute runs, and weeks-long ETL cycles.

As one VP of Digital Experience lamented, “We spent $20,000 on compute last quarter just reprocessing raw event data for a flash sale analysis—and still got results two days late.”

The issue that these teams are dealing with is that they are trading seamless guest experiences for misapplied warehouse architectures. 

Why EDWs Fall Short for Hospitality Analytics

1. Sky-High Compute Costs & Unpredictable Performance

General-purpose warehouses scan billions of event rows on every query, leading to erratic response times and surprise bills—especially when marketers need ad-hoc exploration. Recalculating loyalty funnel metrics mid-campaign can cost tens of thousands and take hours, undermining agile pricing or promo tests during peak travel seasons.

2. Fragile, Resource-Intensive Pipelines

Every new data source—whether front-desk kiosks or in-flight entertainment logs—requires extending custom schemas, rebuilding pipelines, and stitching identities via complex SQL. This brittle approach forces data engineers into an endless cycle of maintenance, leaving little capacity for innovation.

3. Latency That Hurts Guest Experience

Batch ingestion means insights arrive hours or days late. A resort trying to detect booking drop-offs in real time loses cancellations and fails to trigger timely offers—resulting in missed revenue and dissatisfied guests.

Adobe CJA: Purpose-Built for Omni-Channel Analytics

Unified XDM Schema & Event Depth

CJA leverages Adobe Experience Platform’s Experience Data Model (XDM) to automatically normalize digital, offline, and IoT data—so travel & hospitality brands can combine website clicks, loyalty app events, and check-in kiosk interactions without custom tables. The Event Depth dimension then lets analysts pinpoint each step of the guest journey natively, simplifying funnel and path analyses in Analysis Workspace.

Real-Time Ingestion & Full Table Export

Streaming and batch pipelines inject data into CJA in minutes—enabling live A/B tests on loyalty offers during spring break. With Full Table Export, you can deliver curated freeform tables, complete with segments and calculated metrics, to any cloud or BI tool on schedule—so finance, marketing, and ops all work from the same definitions, without rebuilding pipelines.

Shared Metrics & Dimensions for Governance

Centralized, versioned metrics ensure “booking rate” or “guest satisfaction score” are consistent across every workspace—eliminating debates over whose SQL is correct and reducing errors by up to 30%.

Self-Service Analysis for Business Users

The drag-and-drop Analysis Workspace lets non-technical marketers explore mobile-app abandonment or in-hotel IoT interactions without waiting on data engineers—accelerating time to insight and action.

Adobe’s AI Agents: Automating Insights & Engineering

Data Engineering Agent 

This AI Agent auto-discovers schemas, maps data fields, and orchestrates ingestion pipelines—cutting weeks of manual work to hours. Imagine spinning up analysis on a new POS system in a day, not a month.

Data Insights Agent (link)

Built-in generative AI sifts through millions of event rows to surface anomalies—like unexpected dips in premium-room bookings—and suggests high-value segments, then generates narrative summaries in natural language.

Agent Orchestrator & Future Agents (link)

At Adobe Summit 2025, Adobe unveiled the Agent Orchestrator framework, which enables multiple agents to collaborate—think a Loyalty Agent identifying corporate travel groups, then passing to a Journey Agent to craft personalized itinerary offers—all seamlessly choreographed by AI.

Stories That Resonate in Travel & Hospitality

Delta Airlines: Trust Through Personalization

Delta Air Lines uses Adobe Experience Cloud—including CJA—to optimize mobile check-in funnels and deliver targeted pre-flight offers, driving significant lifts in ancillary revenue and customer satisfaction.

Brightline Rail: Rapid Ridership Gains

Brightline tapped CJA for real-time traveler segments across web, app, and station interactions—seeing ridership and revenue jumps within 12 weeks by personalizing offers and schedules.

Hotel Loyalty Programs

One hotel used CJA’s shared metrics to automate loyalty-tier upgrades and personalized promotions across properties—boosting repeat bookings by 25% in under six months.

The Insight You Can’t Afford to Ignore

For travel and hospitality enterprises, shoehorning marketing analytics into Snowflake or Redshift is a costly detour filled with latency, maintenance headaches, and stifled agility. Adobe Customer Journey Analytics, with its purpose-built XDM, real-time ingestion, and self-service tools, transforms event-level data into actionable insights in minutes. Paired with relentless investment in AI Agents that automate engineering and uncover insights....

CJA isn’t just an upgrade—it’s the new industry standard for delivering seamless, personalized guest experiences.