Umbrella

You know when your customers are travelling. Your marketing does not

In every travel agency and at every operator the same information is sitting ready: who is going where, when they leave, when they come back, who they travel with, what they booked. It is in the dossier.

What usually becomes of it is nothing. The pre-departure email does not go out, because nobody has the departure list. The follow-up after the return arrives three weeks late, or not at all. And that someone is celebrating a birthday at their destination is something no one finds out.

The Umbrella Connect integration for Caymland M4 brings this data across automatically and turns a travel date into a trigger.

What the integration gives you

• A customer profile instead of a list of dossiers. Every trip a person has taken sits together, across years and destinations.
• The timing counts. Departure and return are separate dates and can therefore be addressed separately.
• Audiences from real behaviour. Who has been to Canada twice. Who has not booked for two years. Who flies next week.
• No more exports. No departure list pulled in the morning that no longer holds by lunchtime.
• Reportable alongside everything else. Travel revenue appears in the same reports as your campaigns.

What gets brought across

Per dossier:

Per participant: type of participation, first and last name, date of birth.

Per service: this is where it gets specific. What was actually booked comes across:

That departure and return are held separately is the practically most important point. Only then can you say something different before the trip than after it.

What that becomes day to day

Three triggers are ready to use with no preparation:

• Upcoming departures. Everyone leaving within the chosen period. For anticipation, final notes, additional services.
• Returners. Everyone coming back within the chosen period. For the follow-up, the review, the next offer.
• A birthday while travelling. Someone celebrating at their destination. A moment nobody else notices.

Alongside these, the travel data is available as criteria for segments and stages: number of dossiers, number of upcoming trips, months since the last trip.

How the sync works

Direction: from Umbrella Connect to Caymland M4. The integration reads and writes nothing back. Your travel system remains the system of record for advice, booking and billing.

Timing: the sync runs automatically on a schedule in the background, at whatever frequency suits your operation.

Matching: for every dossier it is checked whether the traveller is already known. If so, their profile is extended. If not, they are created. No duplicates arise, not even for regulars with many trips over the years.

A follow-up for incomplete dossiers. Umbrella occasionally reports a dossier before its services are attached. A separate run reads such dossiers again later and fills the positions in. You do not have to do anything or watch for it.

Several accounts possible. If you run several branches, brands or Umbrella accounts, they can be connected side by side, each with its own credentials.

Families, and why that is not trivial

Trips are rarely booked alone. In Umbrella several people hang off one dossier, and they frequently share one email address — the one belonging to whoever booked.

Taken across naively, that would produce either a single contact for the whole family, or four contacts with the same address, all receiving the same email.

The integration handles it differently. Every person becomes their own contact, with their own name and date of birth. If the address is already taken, it moves into a separate field on the fellow traveller and that contact is suppressed for sending. You end up with the complete travelling party in the system — reportable, countable, usable for age groups — without the same address being written to more than once.

What this means for your data

The connection uses a technical account per credential set, stored encrypted. No staff passwords are kept.

The rest holds as everywhere in Caymland M4: all data on a person sits in one profile, can be viewed, exported and deleted, every change is logged, and operation in Switzerland or the EU is possible.

Requirements

On the Umbrella side:

• Access to the Umbrella Connect interface
• The interface address plus a key and secret. Umbrella provides these
• For several branches or brands, the credentials per account

On the Caymland M4 side:

• Enable the Umbrella integration and store the credentials
• Decide which field a fellow traveller's address should fall back to
• Set the schedule for the sync

Setting this up is an appointment, not a project.

What this looks like day to day

The travel agency. Seven days before departure customers get a short email with final notes about the destination. Three days after their return comes the question of how it was. Whoever rates it well is offered next season in the autumn. All triggered by dossier data, with nobody maintaining a list.

The operator with several brands. Each brand has its own Umbrella account. Management sees the picture as a whole and per brand in the same report.

The moment nobody else notices. A customer turns sixty in Lisbon. That morning a message from their travel agency reaches them. It costs nothing and is not forgotten.