Shiv Singh has been with Expedia since January but he is no stranger to the brand. He booked his first flight using the online booking engine in 1998 and has been a fan ever since. Having lived in six different countries and traveling to 45 different countries, travel is a core value for Singh so being offered the job as SVP & GM at Expedia felt like a perfect fit.
“I truly and deeply believe that travel is a force for good,” Singh tells Brand Innovators four months into the job. “When this Expedia opportunity came my way, I metaphorically felt like I was coming home.”
Joining a travel brand could seem risky after the year the category has suffered, but as the world gets vaccinated and reopens Singh is hopeful that pent up demand will drive travel this year.
“Expedia is a powerful brand that matters more than ever especially as we come out of COVID,” Singh says. “Around the world, we are recognizing and appreciating the true value of travel. We took it for granted, and when I say travel, it could be traveling to visit parents in another city or country, it could be business travel, family vacation, it could be anything. It’s such an important time for travel. We appreciate it more than ever now. It means so much to me personally and I think it’s a privilege to join such a wonderful organization and have the opportunity to lead the Expedia brand at the Expedia group.”
At the beginning of the year Expedia Brand conducted a global study to take the pulse on consumer desire to travel this year. The company has run this study for the last 15 years, but after a year like 2020, it was especially interesting to learn what consumers were looking for and planning in regards to travel.
“What we saw in that study is that people can’t wait to travel when they feel ready and that it’s safe,” says Singh. “Everything we are seeing in our own data continues to point in that direction. As the economy opens up, as vaccinations increase, people will feel more comfortable traveling and that’s a wonderful thing. Travel will come back because it’s a part of who we are as people. We like to go visit one another, whether it’s a short drive, a flight across the world, a stay in a resort or a visit to an independent hotel.”
Expedia brand is a global brand that operates in 40 countries and hosts content in 70 languages and manages billions of bookings. “Our job is to be there for our consumers and be loyal to program members at every step of the way,” says Singh. “As they get more comfortable with travel, we want to make sure that they have everything they need all in one place.”
Before joining Expedia, Singh has held marketing leadership roles at Visa, Pepsi and Eargo, a direct-to-consumer med-tech startup and also spent more than a decade on the agency side at Razorfish. Brand Innovators caught up with Singh to discuss his new role and the future of travel. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
What will travel look like over the next couple of years?
As we think about what we are looking to do over the next 1-3 years, we know – and we have seen this so directly with the global pandemic – people are trying to figure out who to trust. They are more worried and skeptical of brands that don’t necessarily fulfill their promises. At Expedia, with 25 years behind us of catering to millions and millions of travelers across the globe, we have incredible trust with our consumers and believe that in a time like this, we can build on that trust. We want to form tighter, deeper brand connections with our consumers.
The Expedia business is phenomenal, it’s an incredible success story. On the marketing side, a lot of that success has been built on being the most sophisticated, thoughtful, and AI driven performance marketing machine. If you think about direct-to-consumer brands and good performance marketing, Expedia is arguably one of the largest performance marketing organizations in the world. Having said that, we also believe that moving forward, the brand side should come through even more strongly because of this age we are in where people align with brands and are looking for brands they trust. With a global pandemic, it’s not as straightforward as it’s been in the past.
As a brand, how can you help consumers feel safe about traveling again?
For us, it starts deeply with the consumers, first and foremost. There is a lot of ambiguity about the safety of traveling right now. It’s changing quickly week by week, with the CDC and the government. There are a million questions that consumers have. We have made the conscious choice to be there with our travelers at whatever point they are at in these ambiguous decisions.
First and foremost, we have enabled the opportunity to book now and travel whenever, meaning that we are advising our consumers to book right now for the summer or fall, but when you book, search for bookings with free cancellations. This way if things change with the pandemic, we are allowing you to make adjustments.
Another big piece is that we have a whole travel advisory area on the Expedia app and website which gives consumers very specific advice on when to travel, how to travel and where to travel so that people aren’t caught off guard when they arrive at their destination. For the course of the pandemic, we have added relevant filters so when you are choosing a flight or hotel, you can see all of the health and safety measures they are taking to help keep travelers safe. While we are optimistic to see that COVID is receding a little bit in the U.S., it’s still a big question on travelers’ minds. We are really trying to meet our consumers in their moments of anxiety. Historically, marketing is about the moments of truth. In these moments of anxiety, we want to really support consumers and be there for them.
How are you working with partners to ensure that they are ensuring safe experiences for your customers?
We are partnering really tightly with the airlines and the hotel properties, right down to the individual hotels as well to make sure we are representing them in the best way possible and helping them reach consumers in new and interesting ways. It’s important to remember that this has been an incredibly difficult year for everyone in the world, but specifically for certain industries, and at the top of that list is the travel industry. Travel has been hit the hardest.
You have held senior leadership roles at brands including Pepsi and Visa before joining Expedia. How has your experience in these roles helped shape what you bring to Expedia?
When I was at PepsiCo, I spoke at the first Brand Innovators event in the history of Brand Innovators. At that time, I learned two very different but very important things. I first learned about servant leadership. The person who ran PepsiCo America’s $20 billion business with 150,000 employees was always practicing and embodying servant leadership. When you have an opportunity to work with a leader like that really closely when you are mid-career, it leaves a really strong impression. That’s the first thing I want to try to bring, those learnings and that role-modeling into the Expedia world, and embody that as I lead the Expedia team. Everything begins with the team, the people, and serving the mission of the business.
At PepsiCo, working on the portfolio brands but spending most of my time on the Pepsi brand in particular, I really learned what it takes to build a loved brand over a multi-year period. I learned what it means to have a place in culture, what it means to embody the timely and timeless of marketing together. When I was at Pepsi, we formed a livestream partnership with Katy Perry on Twitter, and it was Twitter’s largest partnership at the time.
On the Visa side, it was a set of different learning. First and foremost, my roles at Visa were much more global. I spent a lot of time on airplanes to Asia and Europe and really understood the importance and sensibility of marketers and consumers in countries as varied as Montenegro to Japan and New Zealand, literally everything in between. Expedia is a global brand with the same sensitivity. In a similar fashion, while the largest volume of business is in the US, it’s easy as a result of that to forget about the rest of the world. It was the same worry that grounded me in what it truly means to be a global brand and bring a global sensibility to the whole world.
The other thing I learned at Visa that was really helpful and powerful was that it’s a two-sided marketplace between banks, consumers, and the Visa payment network, very similar to how Expedia is with their travel providers. We have airlines, hotels, activity players, car rentals, and consumers on the other side. Success comes from being incredibly sensitive to consumer needs and meeting them where they are at, but also supporting the objectives and mission of your suppliers, like hotels and airlines.
What will travel look like in 2021 and beyond?
Travel is coming back. It’s a force for good and Expedia will be there at every step of the way for consumers. We recently announced a new positioning that is anchored around this insight and the fact that as a brand, we recognize that it absolutely matters who you travel with if you want to maximize your travel experience. Our goal is to ensure we are delivering those experiences to our travelers and while we recognize this will be a multi-year journey for the brand, we’re laser focused on helping travelers feel supported as they get back out there. Finally, what we are doing at Expedia and what matters more than ever is to be purpose-driven, but you can only be that if you are truly committed to it. That’s the journey we are on. I know we talk about purpose-driven marketing so much these days, but we are on that journey with a sensitivity that it’s not just about a good headline or a good story but truly what we are. It goes back to our belief that travel is a force for good that brings the world together. Our goal is to help consumers on every step of their journey, whether it’s on the marketing side or through a deep collaborative partnership with our products, technology teams, or suppliers, we are marketing in a shared fashion for our purpose.
