A family books summer flights online, adds a hotel through the airline’s partner page, downloads the carrier’s app, and joins the airport Wi-Fi. They land to a phone full of destination offers.
One vacation created new data relationships with an airline, a hotel chain, an app platform, a Wi-Fi provider, and the advertising networks connected to all of them.
The International Air Transport Association (IATA) expects a record 5.2 billion passengers to fly in 2026. Each of those journeys multiplies the marketing consents, contact choices, and tracking permissions that travel brands must capture and honor across systems they often do not control.
Preference management is the practice of letting customers choose how organizations communicate with them, which channels they use, and where applicable, how their data is used, and then honouring those choices wherever relevant customer data flows. Throughout the summer, that practice gets thoroughly tested.
Why Summer Strains Customer Preference Management
For some businesses, the summer school break compresses a year’s worth of customer acquisition into a few weeks.
Bookings spike, promotions multiply, and new customer records are created at pace across booking engines, loyalty programs, mobile apps, and partner platforms.
Each touchpoint captures its own version of the customer’s choices. The airline knows the traveler opted into fare alerts, the hotel site may have signed them up for a newsletter automatically, and the app requested location permissions.
If nothing connects those records, no single system knows what the customer actually agreed to, declined, or asked to receive. The result is a season of intense personalized communication built on shakey legal grounds and fragmented customer preferences.
An 18 Million Euro Warning: Travel Data that Moved Without the Traveler
Regulators have begun examining what happens to travel data behind the scenes.
In May 2026, the Spanish data protection authority (AEPD) published an 18 million euro fine against a major travel technology company, whose global distribution system connects airlines, hotels, car rental firms, and travel agencies.
The AEPD found that the company had reused passenger name record data from flight and travel bookings to build traveler profiles for a pilot project with hotel chains, with the aim of enabling hyper-personalized offers and targeted searches.
Travelers were allegedly never told their booking data would be repurposed this way.
The AEPD found breaches of the transparency and lawful basis requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), making the fine one of the largest the Spanish authority has ever imposed.
The case suggests that regulators are willing to closely inspect a defining feature of the travel ecosystem: Data passing through long chains of intermediaries.
The lesson extends beyond consent alone. When customer data moves between systems and organizations, the context governing how that data can be used cannot simply disappear along the way.
One Journey, Many Controllers
One consumer’s single trip can involve an online travel agency, an airline, a distribution system, a hotel, a transfer company, an insurer, and a tour operator.
Under the GDPR and equivalent laws, most of these are separate controllers, each responsible for its own lawful basis and its own record of the customer’s choices.
The practical risk in this scenario is fragmentation. A traveler who opts out of marketing with the tour operator may remain opted in everywhere else, and a preference expressed in the app might never reach the email platform operated by the same brand.
The challenge is not that one opt-out automatically applies to every company involved in the journey. It is ensuring that each organization understands and honors the choices that apply to its own relationship with the customer, across every relevant system and channel.
The rules each controller must follow also vary. Electronic marketing regimes differ across Europe, with different requirements for when an existing customer can be emailed without fresh consent. The picture diverges even further if a booking involves partners in the US, the Middle East, or Asia.
A preference captured to one market’s standard may fall short of another’s.
Fragmentation creates commercial damage as well as compliance risk. Mid-journey is precisely when relevant, well-timed communication is most welcome, and it is also when irrelevant or unwanted contact is most noticed and least forgiven.
What Good Preference Management Looks Like in Travel
A preference center is a self-service hub where customers can see and adjust what data an organization holds, which communications they receive, and how their choices apply across brands and channels.
For travel companies, three preference centre capabilities matter most:
- First, a single source of truth: A record of consent and preferences that every downstream system reads from, so a choice made in the app is honored by email, advertising, and partner integrations alike.
- Second, granularity. Many travelers will happily accept flight status alerts while declining promotional offers, and giving them that choice preserves the relationship instead of forcing a blanket unsubscribe.
- Third, evidence. When a regulator or a customer asks what was agreed and when, the organization needs a time-stamped answer covering every channel, rather than a folder of exports from six disconnected tools.
These capabilities can also impact profit margins.
Consented, well-targeted communication converts better than the scattergun alternative, and a customer who trusts the brand with their choices in July is easier to bring back in January.
Peak Season is a Trust Test
Summer is when travel brands acquire more new customer relationships than at any other point in the year. It is also the moment when those customers are most exposed to the industry’s data sharing practices, as the Spanish case shows.
Regulators are scrutinizing how travel data moves between partners, and consumers increasingly notice when their choices fail to follow them from one brand to the next.
The organizations that treat peak season as a customer preference management exercise, capturing choices once and honoring them across every system and partner, can convert summer bookings into durable relationships.