Skift Take
Despegar has entered a new chapter in Latin America as the site eliminated phone bookings in favor of online bookings only. The company is undergoing major changes and is rethinking how it balances its online and offline marketing.
Editor's Note: Following our previous CEO interview series in online travel, hospitality, and destinations, Skift has launched a new series, this time focused on Chief Marketing Officers.
To better understand the big marketing challenges facing travel brands in an age when consumers are in control, Skift's What Keeps CMOs Up at Night will talk with the leading voices in global marketing from across all the industry's sectors.
These interviews with leaders of hotels, airlines, tourism boards, digital players, agents, tour operators and more will explore both shared and unique challenges they are facing, where they get insights, and how they best leverage digital insights to make smarter decisions.
This is the latest interview in the series.
Despegar was founded as an online travel agency in 1999, but it took nearly 15 years for the company to resemble a booking site. Until two years ago, most of its bookings came from over the phone — including many landlines.
The company has phased out phone bookings over the past two years as online bookings scale faster than call-center bookings. Albeit, customers can still call Despegar's call centers with questions about bookings. The Latin American market is mobile savvy, yet online travel booking is still a novelty throughout much of the region. In parts of Brazil, Despegar's largest market, many airline tickets are still delivered via couriers to travelers' homes, for example. That, along with Brazil's economic woes, have forced the site to emphasize language and assets touting the affordability of travel.
Despegar does this through TV commercials and its YouTube channel, where it informs travelers in Spanish and Portuguese that they can "pay in installments" and find that "offers are cheap" while showing which banks are accepted for payment. Watch one of these videos (in Spanish) below this interview.
The Argentina-based online travel site is one of the largest in Latin America and operates in nine markets including Brazil, Colombia,
