How a global hospitality brand is transforming guest engagement with Transcend

Facing mounting unsubscribes and compliance risk, this iconic resort operator turned to Transcend to modernize their preference management experience—reducing guest opt-outs, improving email effectiveness, and building trust through better privacy design.

At a Glance

• The Customer: A premier global hospitality brand operating 40+ ski resorts across North America and Europe and serving over 2 million guests each year.
• The Challenge: Fragmented consent infrastructure, rising unsubscribe rates, and manual privacy workflows were eroding high-value guest relationships and exposing the brand to compliance risk.
• Why they chose Transcend: To modernize their privacy experience, reduce manual effort, and enable real-time preference orchestration across Amperity and other systems—all while delivering a seamless guest experience aligned with their brand.

The challenge: Fragmented consent infrastructure was costing them high-value guest relationships

This leading global resort company found itself at an inflection point. While its properties and experiences are designed to foster lifelong guest relationships, its outdated consent and communication systems were doing the opposite—eroding customer loyalty, diminishing marketing effectiveness, and exposing the company to regulatory risk.

The company’s existing global opt-in/opt-out program didn’t allow guests to tailor their communication experience. As a result, guests were unsubscribing entirely, often after just a single irrelevant or overly frequent message. There was no support for “opt-down” workflows or granular preference settings—just a binary choice to stay or leave.

This created a growing business problem:

• Unsubscribes from high-value customer segments were accelerating
• Guests had no control over the frequency or content of communications
• Marketing had no reliable system to act on individual preferences
• Campaign performance was trending downward
• The company had no real-time ability to enforce consent across its stack

Compounding the issue, privacy requests were taking over 90 days to fulfill across the 340+ systems that held personal data. DSR requests, data mapping, and policy enforcement were handled by hand, overwhelming internal teams and exposing them to potential compliance gaps. Guest-facing privacy controls were limited, disconnected, and difficult to manage.

The cumulative impact: Lost customer lifetime value, rising compliance risk, and growing internal frustration. One senior leader described it as “a daily reminder that we’re not delivering the experience our brand promises.”

The need: A modern, enterprise-grade preference and consent platform

The company set out to find a solution that could shift its privacy posture from reactive to strategic—putting the guest back in control, while giving internal teams the tools to operationalize compliance at scale. The ideal solution would:

• Provide a fully customizable preference center that supports opt-down, not just opt-out
• Enable real-time preference orchestration across core systems, especially their Customer Data Platform
• Deliver a privacy experience that matches the quality of their brand
• Reduce manual effort and human error in DSRs and consent enforcement
• Strengthen compliance with GDPR and other global data regulations

This was not just a privacy project—it was a cross-functional initiative spanning Marketing, IT, Legal, and Security, aimed at protecting revenue and deepening guest relationships.

Why they chose Transcend

From a crowded field of vendors, Transcend was selected as the partner to lead this transformation.

Key decision-makers included stakeholders from Privacy Architecture, Information Security, Enterprise IT, and Marketing. Their evaluation was based on both strategic alignment and technical fit.

Advanced, Consumer-Friendly Preference ManagementTranscend’s customizable preference center empowers guests to manage their communication preferences with unprecedented granularity. Its opt-down workflows are designed to reduce unsubscribes, increase email conversion rates, and improve overall campaign performance—ultimately driving business growth and fostering deeper guest relationships.

Real-Time Consent Enforcement Across SystemsUnlike other platforms that stop at surface-level UI or require manual data syncs, Transcend enables real-time orchestration of consent and preferences to downstream systems. This was essential for activating compliant personalization through their CDP, which lacked native write functionality.

Integrated with the Existing StackTranscend met the brand where it already operated. Its ability to work with systems like Amperity, Snowflake, and Mailgun allowed the team to enforce consent across marketing workflows without major changes to their core infrastructure.

Impact: Setting a new standard for guest privacy and engagement

The company is beginning its rollout with a single Privacy Center instance that includes partitions for each of its U.S. resorts, with plans to expand globally. The over 40 million known guests will be able to manage their communication preferences in a clear, intuitive interface embedded directly within their digital experience.

Transcend’s platform is expected to:

• Provide a transparent and user-friendly experience for managing personal data and communication preferences
• Foster greater guest trust and loyalty by giving them control over how and when they hear from the brand
• Preserve customer lifetime value by reducing full opt-outs, or “nuclear unsubscribes”
• Improve campaign engagement through more personalized, preference-aligned communications
• Reduce internal effort through automation of privacy workflows and integrations

While full implementation is still underway, the organization is already seeing signs of alignment across teams and momentum behind its privacy roadmap—driven by shared recognition that privacy can be a driver of guest satisfaction, not just a compliance requirement.

At a Glance

• The Customer: A premier global hospitality brand operating 40+ ski resorts across North America and Europe and serving over 2 million guests each year.
• The Challenge: Fragmented consent infrastructure, rising unsubscribe rates, and manual privacy workflows were eroding high-value guest relationships and exposing the brand to compliance risk.
• Why they chose Transcend: To modernize their privacy experience, reduce manual effort, and enable real-time preference orchestration across Amperity and other systems—all while delivering a seamless guest experience aligned with their brand.

The challenge: Fragmented consent infrastructure was costing them high-value guest relationships

This leading global resort company found itself at an inflection point. While its properties and experiences are designed to foster lifelong guest relationships, its outdated consent and communication systems were doing the opposite—eroding customer loyalty, diminishing marketing effectiveness, and exposing the company to regulatory risk.

The company’s existing global opt-in/opt-out program didn’t allow guests to tailor their communication experience. As a result, guests were unsubscribing entirely, often after just a single irrelevant or overly frequent message. There was no support for “opt-down” workflows or granular preference settings—just a binary choice to stay or leave.

This created a growing business problem:

• Unsubscribes from high-value customer segments were accelerating
• Guests had no control over the frequency or content of communications
• Marketing had no reliable system to act on individual preferences
• Campaign performance was trending downward
• The company had no real-time ability to enforce consent across its stack

Compounding the issue, privacy requests were taking over 90 days to fulfill across the 340+ systems that held personal data. DSR requests, data mapping, and policy enforcement were handled by hand, overwhelming internal teams and exposing them to potential compliance gaps. Guest-facing privacy controls were limited, disconnected, and difficult to manage.

The cumulative impact: Lost customer lifetime value, rising compliance risk, and growing internal frustration. One senior leader described it as “a daily reminder that we’re not delivering the experience our brand promises.”

The need: A modern, enterprise-grade preference and consent platform

The company set out to find a solution that could shift its privacy posture from reactive to strategic—putting the guest back in control, while giving internal teams the tools to operationalize compliance at scale. The ideal solution would:

• Provide a fully customizable preference center that supports opt-down, not just opt-out
• Enable real-time preference orchestration across core systems, especially their Customer Data Platform
• Deliver a privacy experience that matches the quality of their brand
• Reduce manual effort and human error in DSRs and consent enforcement
• Strengthen compliance with GDPR and other global data regulations

This was not just a privacy project—it was a cross-functional initiative spanning Marketing, IT, Legal, and Security, aimed at protecting revenue and deepening guest relationships.

Why they chose Transcend

From a crowded field of vendors, Transcend was selected as the partner to lead this transformation.

Key decision-makers included stakeholders from Privacy Architecture, Information Security, Enterprise IT, and Marketing. Their evaluation was based on both strategic alignment and technical fit.

Advanced, Consumer-Friendly Preference ManagementTranscend’s customizable preference center empowers guests to manage their communication preferences with unprecedented granularity. Its opt-down workflows are designed to reduce unsubscribes, increase email conversion rates, and improve overall campaign performance—ultimately driving business growth and fostering deeper guest relationships.

Real-Time Consent Enforcement Across SystemsUnlike other platforms that stop at surface-level UI or require manual data syncs, Transcend enables real-time orchestration of consent and preferences to downstream systems. This was essential for activating compliant personalization through their CDP, which lacked native write functionality.

Integrated with the Existing StackTranscend met the brand where it already operated. Its ability to work with systems like Amperity, Snowflake, and Mailgun allowed the team to enforce consent across marketing workflows without major changes to their core infrastructure.

Impact: Setting a new standard for guest privacy and engagement

The company is beginning its rollout with a single Privacy Center instance that includes partitions for each of its U.S. resorts, with plans to expand globally. The over 40 million known guests will be able to manage their communication preferences in a clear, intuitive interface embedded directly within their digital experience.

Transcend’s platform is expected to:

• Provide a transparent and user-friendly experience for managing personal data and communication preferences
• Foster greater guest trust and loyalty by giving them control over how and when they hear from the brand
• Preserve customer lifetime value by reducing full opt-outs, or “nuclear unsubscribes”
• Improve campaign engagement through more personalized, preference-aligned communications
• Reduce internal effort through automation of privacy workflows and integrations

While full implementation is still underway, the organization is already seeing signs of alignment across teams and momentum behind its privacy roadmap—driven by shared recognition that privacy can be a driver of guest satisfaction, not just a compliance requirement.