Lastminute.com is working with travel publisher Rough Guides, to offer brands a new way to target travel customers.
The two are to combine their first-party data and targeting capabilities to enable smarter targeting of ads. Brands will be able to direct their ads towards the travel audience using both companies’ sites, which include lastminute.com, Rumbo and Bravofly, building bespoke campaigns that it says will target travellers with relevant ads along the way.
Lastminute.com group will use search and booking data to point its website customers to the most relevant travel guides for the destinations they are travelling to, at, says lastminute.com “the point of inspiration”. Rough Guides’ content will be on dedicated microsites on lastminute.com group’s sites.
Alessandra Di Lorenzo, chief commercial officer – media and partnerships at lastminute.com group , said: “We want to help advertisers engage travellers with relevant content from the research and inspiration phase, right through to booking and beyond – and this partnership allows us to do just that. It is part of our strategy to develop more rich, curated marketing solutions that go beyond the banner. And Rough Guides is a perfect partner for us – its iconic travel content will complement our own content creation capabilities, which we’ve been working hard to develop since acquiring WAYN – the world’s largest social travel network – last year.”
René Frey, chief executive at Rough Guides, said: “This is a really exciting partnership for us. Not only will it help our brand partners to reach a bigger travel audience, it will also allow us to engage with consumers in a travel environment and later in the booking funnel, when they’ll have a higher propensity to purchase our product. After all, when is there a better time to offer someone a travel guide than when they’re booking their flight to that destination?”
Lastminute.com group has 43m unique monthly users, while Rough Guides has 3m.
Frey added: “With 35 years of inspiring travellers under our belt, our priority is to keep our original audience coming back while evolving the Rough Guides brand to draw in a younger crowd. With its sizeable reach and young, spontaneous audience, lastminute.com group is the obvious OTA (online travel agent) for us to partner with.”
