Case study August 31, 2026

How a family resort recovered what abandoned carts were quietly costing it

For a family entertainment resort in the United States, an abandoned cart usually meant a guest was gone for good, there was no coordinated, personalized way to bring them back. We helped them build one, so fewer guests slip away.

Service

Adobe

Industry

Consumer

The moment before the tab closes

A family planning a trip has three tabs open: one for tickets, one for a hotel room, one comparing package deals. Then dinner needs making, or a kid needs picking up, and the browser closes. Nothing was decided against. It just got interrupted.

That interruption is one of the most common moments in online travel booking, and one of the most expensive to ignore. Across ecommerce broadly, seven in ten shopping carts are abandoned before checkout, based on Baymard Institute's analysis of ecommerce checkout behavior, which calculates an average cart abandonment rate of 70.22% across 50 separate studies. Travel bookings are especially exposed to it: several family members usually need to agree, the booking is really several linked purchases rather than one and comparing and reconsidering across tabs is part of the normal process, not a sign the guest has lost interest.

For a family resort in the U.S., this pattern showed up directly in the data. Guests were adding tickets, hotel stays, and vacation packages to their carts, showing clear evidence of intent, and some were leaving before completing checkout. The resort needed a way to recognize that moment and respond to it while the intent was still there, without treating every unfinished cart as identical or every guest as fair game for another email.

Plenty of intent, no way to catch it

The resort's booking demand was already healthy. What it didn't have was a coordinated way to re-engage the guests who paused mid-journey.

Web and email were run as separate channels rather than one connected experience, so a guest who saw a reminder banner on the site might still get a generic email later that ignored what they'd been looking at. Getting eligibility right was its own challenge: before any message went out, it had to respect opt-in status, geography, identity, purchase status, prior contact history, and cool-down rules, all at once, for every send. And the message itself had to match the cart. A guest who abandoned a hotel checkout needed a different nudge than one who dropped a ticket purchase or a bundled package.

None of this pointed to a weak booking platform. It pointed to a resort that had outgrown ad hoc, single-channel reminders and needed a re-engagement program with the same real-time discipline as the booking flow itself. There was no existing automated program to build on, so this had to be built from scratch.

One coherent journey, personalized to every guest

The goal was one customer journey, not a stack of separate campaigns: recognize the moment a guest steps away, decide instantly whether and how to reach them, and respond in a way that matches what they were looking for.

We built that journey on Adobe Experience Platform (AEP), using Adobe Journey Optimizer (AJO) to run the real-time decisioning, Adobe Target and the Adobe Web SDK to power the on-site moments, and Customer Journey Analytics (CJA) to turn the resulting guest activity into a reporting foundation rather than a black box.

The journey runs on three steps. It detects cart abandonment or checkout exit intent in real time, pulled from streaming signals across the ticket and hotel shopping flows. It decides whether and how to reach that guest, checking identity, consent, geography, engagement history, purchase status, and contact history before anything goes out. Then it re-engages, through five coordinated touchpoints: authenticated and unauthenticated banners on the ticket cart, an exit modal on hotel checkout, a cart reminder email sent an hour after abandonment, and a second, more considered follow-up if the guest still hasn't returned. Every touchpoint adapts its content and call to action to the product in the cart, ticket, hotel, or package, so the message always matches what the guest was planning.

Guardrails run underneath all of it: the journey exits immediately the moment someone completes a purchase or clears their cart, frequency is capped, and anyone who re-enters gets a seven-day cool-down before the cycle can start again.

The experience was built around four things holding true at once: it had to be relevant to the product in the cart, timely enough to matter while intent was still high, respectful of how often and to whom it reached out, and measurable from day one.

That last point mattered as much as the messaging itself. We built a full measurement foundation underneath the journey: contact-history outputs, clicks, unique clicks, conversion, revenue, revenue per send, and opt-outs, each broken out by touchpoint and by product.

Delivery covered the full lifecycle:

Solution design
Data mapping
Environment readiness
Asset and template setup
Data validation
Unit and logic testing
End-to-end testing
UAT
Production deployment
Hypercare after launch

The team stayed through go-live rather than handing off a build and walking away.

Detect

Real-time cart & exit signals

Decide

Consent, geography, cool-down

Re-engage

5 touchpoints, routed by decide

Auth ticket banner

Signed-in guests

Guest ticket banner

Not signed in

Hotel exit modal

Checkout exit intent

Cart reminder email

Sent 1 hour after

Follow-up email

If still no return

Green = process step · Beige = guest-facing touchpoint

The bookings that no longer got away

Where before there was no coordinated program at all, the resort now has a single connected journey that treats web and email as one experience, protects guests from repetitive or badly timed messages, and produces structured data by touchpoint and product from the first send onward.

The upside here isn't just the bookings themselves. Every guest who finishes a booking they would otherwise have abandoned is revenue the resort no longer has to win back through paid marketing. And a family that wasn't over-messaged, that got exactly the reminder it needed and nothing more, is more likely to come back to the resort's site the next time it's planning a trip. Good timing builds trust. Trust brings guests back on their own.

The measurement foundation pays off in a second way. Every abandonment, decision, and re-engagement now produces structured data by touchpoint and product, so the resort isn't only recovering today's bookings. It's building the record it needs to keep learning which message works for which guest, long after this first version of the journey goes live.

If you're evaluating where Adobe Experience Platform fits into your own customer journey strategy, Nortal's guide to Adobe Experience Platform breaks down how the pieces connect.