Latin America’s Despegar Opens Travel Agencies to Get Travelers to Book Online
Photo Caption: Despegar CEO Damian Scokin. Source: Despegar
Skift Take
If you work for an online travel agency and suggested it open brick-and-mortar stores to bring customers online, you would get very quizzical looks, at the least. Let's see if it works in Argentina and Brazil for Despegar/Decolar.
Why pay Google even more to acquire customers when your company can open travel agency storefronts, and counsel customers to book trips online?
It's not intuitive, but that's a customer acquisition strategy for Argentina-based Despegar, one of the largest travel brands in Latin America.
Skift interviewed Despegar CEO Damian Scokin about the company's online-offline strategy, its relationships with Expedia Group (Expedia has a 16% stake in the company) and Hopper, and efforts to expand internationally. Scokin, who's been CEO since 2017, also discussed the company's M&A strategy, and early generative AI products.
Following are some of the highlights:
Despegar Opens Physical Stores to Bring Customers OnlineDamian Scokin: One of the big opportunities is that half of the market is still offline in Latin America. That's the largest portion of offline in a market anywhere in the world. It's because of the means of payments, it is because
