Case Study: Cruise Line achieves identification of high-potential younger prospects and improved premium upsells with Equifax DSI

How Cruise Marketers Can Better Identify High-Potential Audiences

Equifax worked with cruise marketers who needed to find new, high-potential guests and improve upsell efficiency beyond traditional Baby Boomer and simple income-based targeting. Facing an expanding leisure market and many cruise options, marketers found that life-stage segmentation and a single $125K+ income bracket often failed to identify younger first-time cruisers with the means to travel or to distinguish truly affluent current customers for premium upgrades.

The solution was to append Equifax’s Discretionary Spending Index (DSI®), a household-level spending-capacity score from 1–1,000, to existing segmentation systems. Using DSI helped reveal younger Gen X and Millennial prospects with high discretionary capacity (500+ scores) and discriminate within the $125K+ cohort to find the households most likely to buy suites or other upgrades. The result: more efficient prospecting and upsell campaigns, better-targeted offers, and improved campaign effectiveness by matching promotions to likely spending ability.