Lastminute.com group debuts customer insights tool

Lastminute.com group has launched a new customer insights tool which is designed to use data and advert technology to give brands a deeper understanding of their audiences. It comes after the firm told Travolution that its media brand arm The … Continue reading →

Lastminute.com group has launched a new customer insights tool which is designed to use data and advert technology to give brands a deeper understanding of their audiences.

It comes after the firm told Travolution that its media brand arm The Travel People grew revenue by 30% a year after its rebrand and has become a “strategic focus” of the business.

Designed to give both travel and out-of-sector brands the opportunity to target customers with surveys within ad formats, its customer insights tool will operate under The Travel People and will be piloted by the tourism authority Travel Portland.

Gamified surveys will use the group’s first-party data and its programmatic ad stack to identify audiences and serve questions to them.

Alessandra Di Lorenzo, chief commercial officer at lastminute.com group, said: “Since launching The Travel People last summer, we’ve been working hard to add new capabilities that can support a range of activities for our customers.

“Our 43 million users across Europe means we have a wealth of consumer insight, so why not help our brand partners make the most of this first-party data and get to know their customers better?”

Brands looking to run Travel Insights ad surveys will be offered a customisable service, and lastminute.com’s in-house data analysts will interpret the aggregated data to provide clients with visual and actionable insights.

The tool will be priced based on advertising metrics and consumers encouraged to complete the surveys through prize draws.

Di Lorenzo added: “Integrating our ad technology into the product means we can scale it quickly and cost-efficiently, while our in-house trading team allows us to extend the surveys across the whole web. It’s hugely exciting to bring such an innovative product onto the market and transform the way research is carried out”.

Travel Portland, the destination marketing organisation for the city of Portland, Oregon, is one of the first organisations to pilot the Insights tool.

It will be using a survey to provide greater insight into the demographic of potential UK travellers to Portland and to inform its future strategy to try and better the 2.5 million UK visitors to Portland in 2016.

Billie Moser, vice president of international tourism at Travel Portland, said: “Gaining valuable consumer insight is a key way to inform our brand strategy. We were looking to do so in a new and exciting way to see what else we might learn about our customers.”

The product was developed following lastminute.com group’s acquisition of social travel network WAYN, which used similar technology to gather more than 25 million user-generated ideas in a bid to enhance its content offering.

Peter Ward, CEO of WAYN, added: “Our experience building a similar product at WAYN was invaluable when it came to bringing Travel Insights to life. We’re really excited to offer a similar proposition at lastminute.com group.”