Productsup boosting the post-covid travel industry by automating billions of deals each day

Case

lastminute.com is the European Travel-Tech leader in the dynamic holiday packages business. It operates a portfolio of well-known brands such as lastminute.com, Volagratis, Rumbo, weg.de, Bravofly, Jetcost and Hotelscan. Every month, lastminute.com touches around 60 million users across all its websites and mobile apps in 17 languages and 40 countries.

The Marketing and Product teams’ mission is to provide travelers with the best deals they can offer. This means combining hotels and flights in the best possible way and at the best prices.

Challenges

• Slow time to market
• Reducing manual work
• Insufficient data insights

With deals and prices constantly changing, lastminute.com wanted to automate as much of its work as possible. A manual approach was no longer an option. They needed a feed management solution to create the billions of unique products they put in front of potential customers. Their products were dynamic holiday deals as well as traditional flight or hotel only deals. They then needed the means to get these deals to websites (including their own) and social channels.

Because they promote billions of deals a day, manually updating feeds and promoting channels was becoming increasingly difficult. They couldn’t synchronize the deal availability and the offers quickly enough to guarantee the kind of customer experience that modern consumers expect.

For example, consumers think they are being cheated when the prices between the ad and the final booking price don’t match, so lastminute.com weren’t always able to display prices on their listings.

Solutions

The Productsup client success teams came up with a plan to completely automate the travel giant’s product catalog and then create scalable export feeds. They used the customizable Blank Export templates available in the Productsup system to link these feeds to all of lastminute.com’s partners, processes, and marketing channels.

Because they needed to create “products” from searches, they didn’t have to simply clean product catalogs. They instead needed dynamic feeds that could be updated in real-time and where all order information would synchronize. Productsup created the solutions and gave lastminute.com accurate overviews of all of their feeds, and data in real-time as well as over customized periods.

Results

• Near-total automation of thousands of tasks
• Unlimited real-time feed and order data updates
• Billions of unique of deals can be processed daily

With the solutions, Productsup provided lastminute.com with newly centralized and automated product feeds. The automation of thousands of processes meant that the marketing teams were free to identify new opportunities and experiment.

lastminute.com now delivers billions of dynamic travel deals each day to Facebook and Google as well as providing their own websites and their email marketing teams with the data.

lastminute.com is now in complete control over its data, and it can promote its data and deals consistently. Aitor Azcorra Eguia - Senior Technical Product Manager: “Managing different use cases with different tools and different partners is a world of pain we don’t want to return to. Simplifying, unifying, and automatizing our processes is the only way to generate and distribute so many deals on so many channels each day."

Future plans

lastminute.com are working with the Productsup’s product-to-consumer (P2C) team on continuing to manage and enhance their product data, and to promote deals in a consistent and dynamic way.