After 15 years at Google’s marketing and advertising division, Rob Torres recently returned to his former home at Expedia Group as Senior Vice President of Media Solutions. Like many key figures in travel and hospitality, Torres has seen the industry shift and evolve over time, with technology driving most of the change in the last couple of decades.
“I missed working for an endemic travel company,” explained Torres, candidly. “And I knew that coming out of COVID, travel would grow better than ever, we’d have the golden age of travel again, which we are seeing now. And I wanted to be with a company that was focused on helping travellers get back in the air and get back on those wonderful experiences that they had pre-COVID.”
In this episode of Expedia Talks, we ask Rob about the lessons he has collected and curated over the years to help him prepare for the future of travel. With so much new technology at one’s disposal, how does an experienced travel pro like Rob pick and choose what works best for the task at hand?
“The biggest learning and challenge I’ve had is don’t take technology for granted,” emphasised Torres. He added, “And I think I kind of took that technology for granted that I had at my disposal at Google and the amount of technological resources we had.”
Of course, no conversation with Rob Torres wouldn’t be complete without covering his specialty, Destination Marketing, and how data is helping companies like Expedia create more personalised experiences for each customer. As Torres said in the episode, “It’s going to help us personalise and make marketing much more relevant. We’re taking the learnings from all the data we have and using machine learning to provide more personalised results on the homepage.”
That’s going to help us long term deliver much more relevant leads to our partners, to our destinations, to our supplier partners,” added Torres, before saying, “… and then we can retarget those through different ways. And so, I think that’s really one of the trends we’re seeing.”
We also go over upcoming trends based on Expedia research, the path to purchase, and what the next 12 months looks like for travel and hospitality.
Listen to the full episode here:
