- Increased automation
- Real-time feed updates
- Billions of deals processed daily
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.
We spoke to Stefano Castelli – Head of Creative Production and Aitor Azcorra Eguia – Senior Technical Product Manager, to find out how their product-to-consumer (P2C) transformation is coming along.
What does lastminute.com do?
Our mission is to design the future of travel & tourism through digital technology. We harness technology to provide travelers with the most flexible, easy-to-book holiday experience and the most attractive deals on the market. This means combining hotels and flights in the most effective way and at the lowest prices.
What is your team’s role in this mission?
I look after content and creative production and I lead a team responsible for managing and exporting billions of deals to various channels and websites – including our own – every day.
What were the biggest challenges you faced before you looked for a P2C solution?
At lastminute.com, we promote billions of deals every day. They need to be updated and synchronized in a very short timeframe across multiple channels. We were doing most of this work manually. This is why it was becoming increasingly challenging to guarantee the kind of customer experiences modern users expect.
Automating this workflow and being able to synchronize deals in real-time became essential to ensure the experience was as smooth, consistent and accurate as possible across all consumer touchpoints.
What kind of tailored solutions did the Productsup P2C team create for lastminute.com?
They enabled the automation of our product catalogs – a virtually unlimited inventory of travel solutions – and then transformed them into scalable export feeds. That meant we could increase the number of deals into the billions.
What are your main current export channels?
We are now able to export our deals to Facebook, Google, and our own websites – lastminute.com, Bravofly, weg.de, Rumbo, and Volagratis. We also use the feeds to populate our merchandising on site and some CRM campaigns in a more efficient and structured way than before.
What makes Productsup different?
I like the way Productsup gives us complete oversight on all our data on easy-to-read dashboards. Most other commercial feed management tools don’t offer the kind of visibility needed to exert complete control over our product information value chains. Productsup gives us the big picture. They also have a highly professional support team who assisted us with any technical or functional issues that arose.
Are you going to continue your P2C transformation with Productsup?
Considering our business complexity, we initially struggled to apply our business logic to the Productsup P2C platform. After successfully onboarding, we began to rely on Productsup more and more. It is now a key pillar of our feed management centralization strategy.
Automated and clean data feeds are now a must as we have also approached new markets. Now we have complete control over our data and we can promote deals in a consistent and dynamic way. Managing separate use cases with different tools and different partners is a world of pain we don’t want to return to.
