With their supreme choice of content blended with rich customer data, their mailings should be stunningly refined, expertly targeted and truly talk to me as an individual.

“Hello Traveller,” it begins, “With the 2009/2010 ski holiday season fast approaching now is the perfect time to book your ski break!”

Interestingly if it were the perfect time to book my ski break, it would be the very first time I’d ever put on a set of skis, or even thought about a holiday that didn’t in some way feature sand, salt water and sunburn.

And so it continues, scatter-gunning from UK breaks to Asia and South America and a couple of instantly forgettable promotions.

Its single, solitary nod towards sending stuff that might actually be interesting comes in the form of a Your Preferences button that lets you click through to Expedia and tick some boxes delineating the sort of deals you’d prefer to see.

Why they can’t use the considerable volume of transactional data (flights, hotels, countries visited, dates) that has been built up against my email address over the years is a mystery that may never adequately be explained.

Other than that, to look at the deals featured you can’t click the name of the destination but need to click on the tiny price to its right and the part of the message visible in the preview pane is resolutely generic.

Expedia’s CRM is more like a door drop leaflet than an email, which for a business on their scale is a shade disappointing.

3/10

Analysis and images provided by Nick Gillett, Managing Director at full service digital agency, Tangent One – www.tangentone.com