How Litoralulromanesc.ro maximizes profitability with automated bidding

Litoralulromanesc.ro is Romania’s largest travel agency both by revenue and number of tourists. The agency has built a reputable brand over the last 15 years based on their holiday deals, as well as knowing the Black Sea Coast inside and out.

Yet, with the COVID-19 pandemic, the travel and tourism industry was most impacted —resulting in a 48% year over year decrease in revenue for the Romanian market. In this uncertain time, the winners were the ones who showed readiness to adapt, as well as provided high-quality service.

Leaning into local advantages

Rather than stopping their advertising campaigns due to an international travel ban, Litoralulromanesc.ro leaned into promoting their local travel packages, making the most of their peak season: June through August.

To do this, Litoralulromanesc.ro leveraged their partnership with Criteo for dynamic digital advertising focused on acquiring new customers, that displayed the right message to the people with the highest potential to book with them.

And they added the efficiency of automated bidding to their campaigns, a model, which leverages the Criteo Engine to automatically adjust cost-per-click (CPC) values per individual user to optimize campaigns toward their goal. This automated bidding tool generates a 10% performance increase in comparison to manual optimization.

The traffic acquisition, consideration campaign, leveraging Criteo’s similar audience targeting and powered by Criteo’s lookalike AI, helped the Litoralulromanesc.ro identify the best potential new customers that are similar in browsing and purchasing characteristics to their recent visitors. This yielded 31% of the new visitors reached coming back to the travel agency’s website.

Generating success in uncertain times

Even though the travel industry is facing uncertainty, Litoralulromanesc.ro is maintaining comparable profitability to their previous year, while achieving the same cost of sale (COS). This enables them to invest more and scale their business quickly.

This achievement is only possible with Litoralulromanesc.ro’s willingness to adapt to market changes, and trust in their consultative partnership with Criteo to help them navigate these difficult times.

Litoralulromanesc.ro’s CEO, Ionuţ Nedea, elaborates, “In an atypical year for tourism worldwide, as well as nationally, Litoralulromanesc.ro, as the No. 1 tour operator for holidays market on the Black Sea Coast, had to adapt quickly to the new demands coming from tourists.”

He goes on to say, “We had to show dynamism and flexibility, and the partnership with Criteo provided us with the tools we needed to do so. In a fast-moving market where customers’ buying intentions were influenced day-to-day by external factors not related to tourism, but to the pandemic context, thanks to Criteo, we managed to reach customers very quickly and have 100% control.’’