Transavia makes every customer interaction count with Pega
See how Transavia drove a 24% increase in ancillary revenue per customer while keeping satisfaction high.
ancillary revenue per customer
increase in NPS across personalized touchpoints
+1.2%
returning customer rate across 25 million annual passengers
The Business Issue
For leisure travelers, flying is an occasional event, not a daily routine. Transavia, a European low-cost airline operating within the Air France–KLM Group, serves more than 25 million passengers a year across over 400 routes. Unlike digital retailers or ride-share apps, Transavia typically engages with the average customer just once or twice a year. That leaves a short timeline to capture traveler interest and earn repeat bookings. With such limited interaction, every customer touchpoint matters.
To stand out, Transavia chose not to join a race to the bottom on price. Instead, their leadership focuses on relevance – delivering empathetic service and context-aware offers at every touchpoint.
It’s a great strategy, but legacy marketing approaches made true relevance difficult, and Transavia's early channels – web, app, email, and push notifications – operated in isolation. Email might promote a seat upgrade while push notifications offered a discount, completely disconnected from what the user saw on the homepage. Adding to this, historical booking data couldn’t predict a customer’s current intent. A family trip to France one month offered zero insight into a weekend golf outing with friends to Spain the next. Without understanding a traveler's current context, Transavia risked sending irrelevant messages and offers that felt out of sync with their needs.
The Solution
Transavia used a pause in flight schedules during the 2020 pandemic to rearchitect its customer engagement approach. Rather than running isolated campaigns, the airline unified its data landscape and connected customer touchpoints through Pega Customer Decision Hub™ to support more consistent, real-time engagement decisions.
Instead of blasting static sales offers, Transavia mapped a continuous customer journey running through Customer Decision Hub across the web, mobile app, email, and push channels. The decisioning engine analyzes three distinct user states in real time.
First, in the booking and post-booking phase, high data density enables Customer Decision Hub to deliver individual one-to-one nudges, confirmation details, and relevant ancillary offers. Then, for known returning customers, the system uses data from Air France and KLM’s Flying Blue loyalty program, trip history, and real-time site behavior to encourage re-booking. For unknown visitors, Customer Decision Hub tailors recommendations based on active search behavior and inferred intent to convert anonymous browsers into known customers.
Transavia’s masterstroke is prioritizing timing over pure targeting. By embedding Pega’s arbitration logic, Transavia evaluates propensity, value, and business rules to surface the ideal action. Service communications – such as confirmation emails or check-in notifications – serve as organic containers for personalized ancillary offers, such as third-party car rentals or cabin luggage reservations.
Crucially, if a traveler experiences a major flight disruption or delay, Customer Decision Hub helps Transavia suppress commercial upsells. Instead, the system shifts tone to deliver supportive service information or tailored welcome-home messaging.
The Results
By replacing aggressive sales tactics with real-time customer relevance, Transavia has delivered value that adds up – driving commercial growth and stronger customer loyalty. In terms of sales performance, personalized touchpoints across channels have driven a 24% increase in ancillary revenue per customer.Traveler experience and customer engagement have also significantly improved: Net Promoter Scores (NPS) rose 5–10% across personalized touchpoints, while click-through rates on existing marketing touchpoints increased by 45%.
Customer retention also grew with the returning customer rate increasing by 1.2% – a significant impact across 25 million annual passengers. And with Pega Customer Decision Hub running quietly in the background, Transavia is proving that commercial success and customer empathy go hand in hand.
Looking ahead, Transavia is positioned to reimagine and run its real-time data layer to stay competitive as travelers increasingly move toward AI-driven search and discovery channels.
Want to dive deeper into Transavia's journey? Watch their PegaWorld session here.
Give every customer exactly what they want.
"Timing beats targeting. Of course we use propensity, but having the right context together with the right offer is crucial and makes a real difference."