The Travel Marketing Podcast

Civitatis' Approach to Market Dynamics

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So today I had the opportunity to interview Ismael Garcia. He's the CMO and head of growth, a company called Civitatis. And if you don't know Civitatis, it's possibly because you're not in a Spanish speaking or Latin America or some European countries and you're in the U S it's just, it doesn't have the biggest presence in the U S but I want to give you some visibility into the scope of this company.
They are in 4,000 destinations. They've got nearly 90,000 activities listed on their website and they have over 30 million customers. It is a huge operation. It is a huge OTA. Think of the likes of Viator and get your guide. It's just if you're in the States, you don't see them as often.
So Ismael and I sit down and talk a little bit about what it takes to be the CMO of a travel marketing compan, it was an incredible conversation, it's got career advice, it's got budget structure, it's got how to build a team. It's how to keep people accountable.

I hope you enjoy this as much as I did and we'll jump right in now.

Well, Ismael, thank you so much for joining me today. I'm really excited to jump in with you.

Yeah. I was saying thank you for joining and for having me with you again.

Absolutely. Yeah. Civitatis has always been a really interesting company to me. I would say I met one of your colleagues, Enrique, about three years ago at a conference and we have, I think two or three team members in central and South America, so they're much more familiar with y'all than we are here in the States. But it's really amazing what y'all have accomplished and I think on the marketing side, I'm really excited for our audience. That's a little more senior or wanting to move into VP and C level to kind of learn from you and how you've built your marketing team. So if you're okay with it, I'd love to start there.

Sure.
So I just joined Civitatis a year ago and the way we are working here, we are operating in a very wide scope. We're working throughout the whole a funnel, right? And so we're going from branding and awareness up to retention and monetization.
That means we have both B2B and B2C activity, and we have five different teams, right? So we've got comms, PR, social, branding, performance marketing, customer acquisition, and customer retention, right? This is a very, very wide team that has very different goals and issues to tackle.

So just getting kind of into like how this works so does each team kind of have a Director that reports to you? And that's how you manage all of that.
Yes. We have a head for every team.

So you've got, so these five pillars, performance marketing, I assume that includes like paid marketing, SEO, all the down funnel, let's create bookings stuff, right?
How, in terms of managing that, cause that is a lot of pillars. How do you break down your approach here? Days even, do you have a meeting rhythm? Like, how do you hold the team accountable? I guess is what the question I'm coming to is.

Yeah.
I think you're right. This scope is very, very, very wide and we're working on several key markets, right? So it's not just like one market. And so it's like seven key markets, five different teams, different angles and different strategies. And so I have a head as we were saying for each area and the way to keep those teams accountable for is really working through goals targets, and we internally use OKRs which I'm a big fan of. I've been working with OKRs for four years now and I think it helps every team and work together to meet the company's goals in different ways, right? And so I think the beauty is in creating good OKRs that are big, wide enough so that every team can understand how they impact the company goal and to help the company reach new heights.

Is this like a quarterly process?

Yes.

Okay. I got you. Let's pretend that in the middle is like perfectly achievable, do you go north of that? How do you goal set? I think it depends in every company and how the approach is for OKRs that work with the typical OKRs as Google said them at the beginning, which was like, “Hey, if you reach 70%, it means you're doing good because we just put very high goals” and then I worked at them right in the past where the goals were achievable and a 100% was the bar to meet. Here at Civitatis we're working with this realistic goal and reaching 100% means you're good, right? We always try and have teams and we motivate them to go beyond that 100%, but yeah, the bar in these cases is the 100%.

Okay, so you said not necessarily easy goals, but realistic goals.

Exactly. And then the last question I have around kind of like team and accountability, because I think that's the most important thing when you get to your level. It's you're not obviously in platform making decisions. I mean, you might not even be doing budgeting, you might be high level budget and allocating budget to your team, but obviously you need to ultimately be responsible for results. So how do you monitor throughout the quarter? 13 weeks, how things are progressing? Is it a weekly meeting? Is it bi-weeklies? What does that look like?

So going back to your point before I answer, I think the budgeting part is super important, right? It's crucial and so the way we set our goals means that those goals need to be in line with our budgets. And so if you reach, if every team reaches the 100% then we should be meeting our company goal from our side of things. And it should make the budget works, that's how we build those and we make sure they are consistent with what the company needs to achieve. And then if we review those on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, really depends on what team, right? Like Comms and PR is probably not going to be our daily basis.

Yeah.

Probably going to be more on a monthly basis.

What is your newest publication you got on in the last four hours?

Exactly. We do have an end of week email where we see all the work that has been done during weeks because this is like a weeks and months process. And then we have other teams, like Performance, where basically you need to look at the numbers on a daily basis. So it depends on, on every team.

I got you. So it's not consistent it's more so based on the needs of that specific channel, which leads me to go to the channel. So I'm an SEO and advertising guy. So my background is SEO for everything again, from OTAs to operators. And paid media specifically on Google, Meta, TikTok. When you're looking at channels, let's just talk about paid and organic. Those are both paid search and organic. These are really strong channels for OTAs generally, right? Cause it's bottom of funnel, it's at the purchase point. People are making their specifically in tours and activities, they're making their purchases right up into the trip and then also once they're already there. So it's high intent, ready for purchase.
How do you look at SEO and paid as a level of importance in your overall marketing mix, specifically paid search, and then how do you see them working together or against each other?

Yeah, I think that both important in an ideal world, organically presents all your, your acquisition and there is no paid. And so you are a lot more profitable from a financial point of view. That's not the truth. And that's not what happens on the market, right?
And so I think both channels are equal, are different and complementary. And so I think you need to reach and cover users at different stages in different trials and look really at how they complement each other, especially if you're working in five different languages, as we are in seven different markets. And so in some markets we're ranking well for what to do in Paris, right? And so we need ads to help and complement there. Whilst in other markets we are strong and then we can basically just play that game. We're also seeing benefits when we have both, SEO, number one results and Paid Ads. So I think they work together. We're talking about like cannibalization, I think we have to look at it. That's number one priority and especially when we see that there are constant changes in search result pages. We're seeing more and more things to do. Results coming out, page and organic. We're seeing AI gem results coming as well. And so the landscape is evolving on a weekly basis now, like it's really hard to see Google not making changes or testing something every week.

Every day?

Every day. Exactly. And it's going to keep happening, right? And so we need to get used to it and just look at as the pie that works together, right? Like the balance is very important here, but yeah, both are equally important.

So you mentioned the multi-language. That's a very difficult thing in travel. We talk to a lot of companies as sizable companies that you would think had figured out how to do multi-language, but they haven't.
How do you tackle five different languages? How do you tackle five different languages and paid an SEO? That's the question.

So we have Internet teams, we've looked at AI, content generation, translations and all that stuff. This is a company that really believes in human capital and in the power of creating great content by local people. And so we have a full team of content creators. We have paid search specialists in every language and it's a different approach to what you would be thinking nowadays. And so yeah, expertise and having local people, we have people in Latam, we have people in Spain, we have people speaking French, Italian, Portuguese in markets. And I think it's the real deal, right? It's not only about the language, it's about the culture as well.
I'm lucky enough to speak four languages.

What languages do you speak? Goodness.

French, Spanish, English, and Italian, although my Chinese is a bit rusty, but I learned French and Spanish since I was born. And you understand that it's not only words. There is a difference in culture in how you say things, some languages are more direct, some aren't. And I think that matters.

Even you look at a large language model and compare that to like Google Translate, and it does a better job of understanding at least the inflection and understanding, but it still is not to the level of human as it's getting very close though. I have a feeling it's going to get very, very close. If not better.

Absolutely. It's just, it's gonna get like practically, I think. It's going to be super practical. Now somebody that can have the language can understand not only the language, but the culture. I spent three years in London. I learned a lot about East East culture, about London. If I had gone to New York and learned the language there I'm sure my culture or my mindset will be slightly different, right?

Yeah, you wouldn't be as nice.

So let's get back on because I'm already 15 minutes in and this is going to be a long interview.

So what is a channel that you've tested that's completely failed?

I'd say we tested this year, we tested some AI channels so AI chats that are charged GPT and others on mobile connected to WhatsApp and others see if we could drive some demand from there or even awareness. So we tried all stages of marketing and it didn't, it didn't deliver the results we thought it would. I mean, it was like a complete fail in those tests. Doesn't mean that that market is gonna fail. It's just, I think, trying to find their product market's fit and that the landscape is gonna keep changing and evolving, right? So at some point, I'm sure like we need to keep testing and at some point I'm pretty sure people are going to start using it differently. But yeah, I think we need to keep testing those channels constantly.

At least on October 30, 2024, when we're testing this. I mean, when we're recording this, it was not an effective channel for you.

Absolutely. It will in the future. I'm sure it will not there yet. More than campaigns and strategies, I think the real challenges in our space is the attribution, right? Like editing the right channels, especially the view-based ones, It's hard, you need to work with incremental testing and other type of tools that aren't as comfortable as we were in the past.

I'm going to knock out another part of my agenda and we're actually going to go into attribution because I'm a hundred percent in agreement. That is the most difficult thing in travel and you're lucky because you have a custom platform, a vast majority of the travel companies we talked to that are in like the three to $5 million in annual bookings range that are operators. They don't even have server side tracking, they're using Fare Harbor, they're using any of these res techs to get their bookings, right? You know this, these operators are the ones that list on Civitatis. So given that you do have service ad tracking, which for those who are listening, basically it is a significantly improved way of tracking versus a third party cookie that you'd be using to track your conversions on your site.
What is your attribution model? First, let's start there.

Yeah, we have several. I don't think there is one solution that fits all. We have the tick-based, we have a view-based, and we basically give credit differently the first and last touch for internal purposes. We'll have one model for marketing. The budget decisions will have others, we're also looking at more than attribution models, which I think we obviously need to use, but I have a lot of doubts about attribution nowadays, right? With iOS, with people using different platforms, even with that, some models, it's hard to really understand the impact of every activity you have. And so that's why.
We're working with incrementality testing geo holdout tests, understanding what happens. So you need to have certain volume, right? You know, to do that, but your whole test is I think a powerful tool that helps us understand better how Meta, TikTok.

What was it? What did you say was a better tool? The incrementality testing?

Yeah. Incrementality testing. You don't necessarily need that tool, there's several, not that many, but you can have it internal with the data science team, you can use the tool like measured.com,

you can have an agency help you there. You usually need some volume that luckily we have here at Civitatis because we're basically 10 million self-service attractions.

There you go. That helps. And I guess what I'd love to hear a little bit about is you do have, you're a scaled OTA, you're a large OTA, biggest in a lot of the markets that you play in. So you raised some money. You raised about $50 million in an additional funding round. I'm curious, like there's all different reasons to raise money, there's operations, there's marketing, there's growth, but you're in this category of company where most of your competitors are spending what, 50% of revenue on growth and marketing. My comps are Expedia and booking, right? I'm not, I can't remember what Viator is doing, but you look at that and my assumption is a lot of this is going into your department. A lot of this is going into marketing and scale. You can correct me on that assumption, but really what I'm curious about is what channels are you excited about? Where are you allocating budget? And how do you think about that?

So I think it's really important to mention and to understand that Civitatis is a EBITDA positive since inception, right? We're like the company is making money since day one and the company is looking at keeping both its profitability and year-over-year growth rates that are quite aggressive. And we're lucky enough that we're able to do both at the same time. So we're focusing on Latam right now and the money is obviously helping on growing faster in Latam, but we aren't the type of company that is going to be burning the cash like other players you're mentioning are probably doing, right?

It'll help you open up like Argentina for instance, right?

Yeah, we're already well. So we've got Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, our markets where we're definitely playing, but again, we aren't going to go and burn the cash. It's very rational. It's a EBITDA mindset and the profitability mindset is part of the DNA of the company.

And I'll clarify for some more junior marketers who are not familiar with the term EBITDA, which is the term that Ismael is using is basically it's earnings before interest, taxes, appreciation, and depreciation, which basically means how much money is your company making without the extra strapped financial maneuvers or any debt service interest that you're paying. Basically what he's saying is Civitatis has always been profitable, which is amazing. First off, that's not an easy thing to do. I mean, I'm a bootstrap business, Propellic is bootstrapped and I know how freaking hard that is. And I know that you've been there for a year and I have known Enrique for much longer and I know how much care goes into every decision. So that's amazing.
So I take it it's the way you're doing it is you're not like going to test something for six months and see if it works. You're doing a tight feedback loop where it's let's use some of this money, test, see if it makes it, if not cut it.

Yeah.

My philosophy, not that you asked, is we're going to do 10 things in marketing and one of them is going to work and nine are not, and that's fine. You just have to budget and plan for that and then exploit the one, right?

Yeah. And cut the other nine, which is the difficult part many times because they're like, well, I like it. It's yeah, what does it do? And that's a problem we usually have in marketing. We love to launch new stuff and to think about new stuff and execute on new stuff. But then we're really bad at killing it.

So let's say you have a new initiative. You're launching some initiative on your team. It doesn't work. How do you talk to the person that was leading that initiative about that? And how do you kill it basically, but still maintain that person's dignity and, and, you know…

Yeah, I mean, I don't think there should be a dignity or it's not the person who's failing at all. I think most of the things shouldn't work, right? If everything works, it means you're just basically doing the basics. You're not taking risks, and I think the most important thing is to have the metrics and to keep people accountable. And so if you set some goals and you haven't reached those goals or you have reached the goals but instead of taking 10 hours, it's taken a thousand hours, then you just need to come up with post-mortem and just like, Hey, what happened? How do you see this performed? Was it good? Was it bad? And the person says it went well, but I think otherwise we're going to a post-mortem and…

Let's see…

Yeah, exactly. Again, I don't think this should be taken personally. And I think what I have seen when working in American companies that they're in a campaign, they're in a project is a learning opportunity and shouldn't be seen as personal failure.

Yeah. Well, we've got several strategic initiatives we're working on. We're more up market with the companies that we work with our services historically have started at 60, 80, $100,000 minimum for contracts and we're creating a down market offering called accelerate, which, you know, we're putting intro prices at 3,500, 4,000, somewhere in that range, which is like something we've never done before. So the person leading that who's building it, basically we had a conversation and said, here's the point at which we know this isn't working and when we're going to kill it, but hopefully it does work. So I think we're both, we treat those things very similarly.

One thing that struck people, brands struggle with in multi destination, obviously, and multi source market. So I want to talk a little bit about seasonality. I'm going to pivot a little.
So I've recently, like, I've seen some really cool tools that bring GDS data, global distribution system data, and do forecasting into what search demand and what travel demand is going to be at in certain destinations, which is way on one side. And then way on the other side is the average travel company who says, oh my god, we're not selling anything this time of year.

And it sucks because our fixed cost structure is killing us during this time of year. So how do you manage seasonality and demand and how do you keep on top of that?

Yeah. So again, as I was saying, we are multi-platform like multi-destination, multi-source market. And so that kind of raises to the most seasonality parts, of course we have some seasonality, but it isn't as hard as I would have imagined from the outside before joining. And so there are many off-peak seasons. People have been traveling more and more outside of the usual peak seasons. Tradition in Spain was very, very strong in August for the last 30 years. Now it's evolving and we're seeing more people who go on June, July, September. We're seeing also more and more people anticipating, right? And so when we think about travel, there are still a lot of people that do the last minute booking, but we're seeing more and more anticipation.

So the date of booking for a trip in June could be February, March. Including the single day tour? Yeah. And you're seeing a lot of that. We're seeing out of that. We're seeing more anticipation. So it basically breaks seasonality down. And last but not least, you need to think about the fact that maybe Europe's summer is July, August in Argentina, it's going to be December, January, basically once growing in Latam that kind of events, the seasonality.

That's really interesting. And then like comparing the Spanish market to the Argentinian market. Like those are different travelers, right? Those are two different travelers. So how do you learn a market that you're entering for the first time, not on the supply side, but on the target, you know, source market side?

Well, I think you're mentioning supply. This whole looking at the demand side, you need to understand the supply side, right? So it's not one thing I think it's definitely both.
What I would say here is that we need to first make sure that there is a product market switch. And so you need to validate that Argentinian people are looking for the type of activities you are offering. You need to make sure that the way you communicate it resonates with Argentinian people. Latam is a complex market. Our complex markets. I just made the one mistake that most people do is Latam is, and Latam is that Latam are, right? Even Brazil is several different markets. And so payments like so and all that type of stuff needs to be tight before you start looking at spending money on those markets. Once you're there, I think it's just like really good to go on the markets and understand how media consumption works. It's very different to be in Mexico than to be in Buenos Aires, for example, messaging is very, very different. You go to Mexico, you want to do out of home. You want to do cinema, you want to use different types of colors. And so you need to adapt to the local codes. I would say here, it's tropicalization. So we need to tropicalize our messages. So that's an interesting challenge.

Wait, explain this. Wait, tropicalization, like the English word tropical?

Yeah, it's exactly like that. I don't know how it sounds in English, but in Spanish it means basically we need to forget about the, we speak the same language, Spanish language, but it's very, very, very different, right? And so we need to make sure there are those cultural nuances. Some words have completely different meanings for an Argentinian and a Spanish person going from a nice word becoming a very bad word. I am not asking more than that, but yeah, that's a big challenge. So media consumption and just making sure we have the messaging and the communication right once we have perfect market seats.

Are there any markets you're particularly excited about entering?

Yeah. I mean, Mexico, Brazil, they're like huge. They're not even like countries. They just call them continents. And I'm super happy about answering that Argentina is also a funny market as well to answer.

Okay. I got it. Yeah.
I saw, I don't remember, I read something about y'all's Argentina plans. I can't remember where, but that's the reason that I had specifically called that out.
Okay. So we talked about goal setting and we talked about, OKRs, let's talk a little bit more about nitty gritty reporting. So we talked about attribution. I'm going to be quick on this one because we've danced around it a little bit, but what metrics are you looking at on a day-to-day basis yourself?

So I have the five teams. And so I'm obviously, again, as I was saying, I'm not looking at every team's metric on a daily basis. On a daily basis, I'm going to be looking more at how we generate traffic, conversion rates and profitability of those campaigns. It's basically also my background. I come from a paid marketing, I'm a like a marketer starting from, uh, performance marketing, going into a CMO role. And so I have that professional, that's my concept, that's where I'm kind of most comfortable with so I'm looking at those and then not on a daily basis, but we're looking at brand awareness. We're looking at how many clippings we get, how many links we get. And so again, every team has its series of KPIs. Obviously paid is the one that needs the most attention.

And then between marketing channels, between your positioning and what you're trying to accomplish, this can be one of the hardest things for a brand or performance marketer to figure out the other side. How do you balance and or manage the tension between performance marketing and brand marketing?

I think we're lucky here at Civitatis because there is a strength foundation on the company's DNA, right? The vision was set very clearly since day one and so it's all about we're not a marketplace like other OTAs you'll find, we are a created marketplace. And so it means when you go to Rome, you won't buy 1,200 Coliseum tours, we have the three best ones.
The three ones we think are the best for most of us.

Who are your Rome ones? Is it like Crown Tours?

I don't have the supplier names here, but we basically, Coliseum, we find the three best we've seen the best ones. We have a full team of supply selector curators and they're going to go for the best supplier at the price we think is the right price. And so it's a very different approach than other players that we have more self sign on do it yourself platform where everybody can kind of enter.

Yeah.

The goal there is really to only be created in a faster way. It's really like, hey, somebody's going to Rome. They have 120 options of things to do, let's not give them 1,000 options for everything they need to see, right? And so that simplicity is built into the DNA of the company.
Customer care, I'm putting the traveler at the center, a forefront in the company, so the attention there, I think brand building is really built into the experience of the user. Like we find problems once they experience Civitatis, they trust Civitatis and so that quality helps us build on that, right? The attention is there short term versus long term as we're asking and to get back to the question, I think at the end of today, if you want to have a bot on a funnel that has a good ROI, you need to invest in the upper funnel that's going back to the incrementality testing.
That's what we're talking about earlier on. We see in markets when we invest in upper funnel, we see that our bottom of funnel improves and so you're building the brand and you can see it throughout the whole funnel. You just need to make sure that you are keeping tabs on profitability in our case, other players won't be doing that, but in our case, like when we invest, we just need to see the metrics go up in other parts of the funnel.

I gotcha. Absolutely. So you said something interesting. You said when a traveler experiences Civitatis, they trust Civitatis, right? But as you just described, you don't own the product, your sourcing inventory, right? And things can go wrong, they definitely can go wrong. And you're dealing with millions of passengers, so they will go wrong.
What is your crisis management function look like?

So we have, our customer care team is internal, right? We have our people there, we have them here in Spain and some part of them in Latam, they're part of the company. They are super important feedback loop in the company many times. So we're lucky because our curation makes us choose the partners that are gonna generate less friction. It still happens, there's still friction. And so every negative comment, every negative feedback is an opportunity for us to improve, demonstrates our commitment to the traveler. And every feedback is an opportunity to make that client happier, to deal with it fast, in a good way. It also serves us, and we incentivize our customer care teams to raise their hand when there are improvements in the tools descriptions, in the Q&As, and so it's really like we use that feedback loop to improve the product. Things are going to go wrong, we just need to be fast and make sure we answer in the right time, empathize with the client.
I myself, that's on a personal note, I knew about Civitatis back in 2018. I was in Budapest. I booked with them mostly because I came to SEO probably or Paid, I had an issue, I was in Budapest with my girlfriend and it was a big stress. Two minutes later, the issue was solved. And I was like, all right, next time I'm going to use this tool because when I have issues, they answer and they're here.
So yeah, I think it's different.

What about the things that go above customer support? There's things that customer support, it just escalates, yeah.
So what about those things?

You can have public relations crisis and that type of stuff. And so when that happens, I think the company, again, it's the DNA of the company, right, like creation quality and simplicity and customer care. And so that same kind of approach is taken. Luckily, there was COVID a few years ago, COVID was the biggest matter for the whole market. And the first thing they did on the first day was, hey, we need to give the money back to all travelers. Those people are not gonna be able to enjoy their bookings, their holidays. So before they ask for the money, let's go and do it proactively. So I think having a transparent stance, providing clear and up-to-date information, being proactive Is super, super, super important. Like people remember companies for how they behave when times are bad. And I think that's super important, there's no better brand building campaigns and managing a crisis.

Yeah. I mean, I think people find out about people and companies when things are bad, right?

Exactly. For good or bad.

Yeah. This is amazing. I want to take one more kind of pivot in our conversation before we wrap up and just get some people inspired about travel marketing and the career path within it. So clearly you've gone through a lot to get to the CMO level of a multinational large OTA, such as Civitatis. Tell me about your career path. How did you get there?

I studied in Geneva, Switzerland, where I'm originally from. And so I had this shaped career that I was talking about. Started in a media agency in Geneva, then moved to London because just wanted to experience the digital world there.
I was lucky enough to find a few companies where I could learn a lot in performance marketing, the early Google ads, AdWords days, and learned a ton American companies that really look at ROI and the sense that have like both strategies as well. And after a few years in London, decided to move to Spain, enter the very small startup, ticketing startups called Ticketea. That company was then acquired by Eventbrite in 2018, and so I was lucky to move from the small start-up of where I was the first marketeer, we moved into an 80 people company with a 40, 30 people marketing or to then unicorn of Silicon Valley unicorn that was IPO, that was going IPO a few months later. And so I think that was super interesting, understanding how Silicon Valley company worked and looking at material organizations working in a product led organization as well. So super, super, super interesting. I think the ticketing companies, the ticketing experience was very interesting to me. I could see both B2C and B2B sides of a marketplace.

Well, I should ask, right now at Civitatis are you B2B and B2C or just B2C?

We're both, but we're like a lot more B2C.

But you specifically like the scope of your role? Are you doing any B2B marketing?

Both.

Okay.

Yeah, we're doing both. But as any company, I think it's here and tickets there was this startup marketplace that was more B2C. And so 90% of the work would be B2C and 10% was B2B. Evenbrite was the opposite 90% B2B and 10% B2C.

Got it.

Yes. Civitatis is 90% on the B2C side.

Which makes sense. Obviously.

Yeah.

Did you make any mistakes? Anything that you could share that you would not do to kind of help some of the younger junior marketers with their career that are listening to this?

Yes, I think you learn from every mistake, right? So that's the important part where you're gonna make mistakes. So just make sure you get the most out of those mistakes. Don't call them failures. I entered the company, a video game company, when I was working in London. I was a huge fan of their video games, and my decision was driven by my passion. And not really about understanding where the company was and what was the situation in the company. And so when I entered, I was like, all right, this is a true company with different layers of decision and it wasn't really a good fit. So that's learning. I think when you make moves or when you decide to go into a company, don't always go for the passion, but just try to have neutral hats and understand where the company is at and what are the plans of the company, where they're going to.

And then not to let it go to your head. You did just win an award sometime this year. You clearly know what you're doing, I would just, without getting too deep into things like the marketing for e-commerce stuff and the best digital specialist title, what would you say on the other side, not a mistake, but what's one thing travel marketers should focus on to achieve success? If there was just one thing that really has stuck out in your career, what would you say?

I would say test a lot, learn a lot by making mistakes, cut things that don't work fast, and just make decisions, data and attribution are complex. They are going to be harder to have real certainties on, and so just make sure that you're fast in making the go or no-go decision, and ultimately more than doing a lot of stuff, just trying to focus on the few things, when they're tested focus on those things and do them well.

Amazing. This was an awesome interview. Thank you so much. What's your next travel destination? Where are you going next?

Uh, thank you, Brennen. Yeah, it was definitely awesome. I'm probably going to go skiing back to Switzerland for the holidays. Yeah, it's probably going to be the trip I do next and probably Paris back in Q1 next year.

Amazing. I've got my first three ski trips of the year booked. I'm ready to go. Unfortunately, I can't get into the Alps as easily as you can being that I live in Texas, but maybe someday.

Where are you going?

Right now I've got Jackson Hole, Big Sky and Alta and Aspen, the US Rockies.

Yeah, I heard the Aspen isn’t bad so…

Aspen, you know, there's Mountain Travel Symposium, which is a mountain travel conference being hosted there. So that's what I'm going for.

Thank you so much. I'm sure we can catch up more offline. I really appreciate you joining me today.

No, thank you. Thank you so much.

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