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.

Dennis Schaal

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 Online

Damian 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 of financing, a lot of things. Since we bought Viajes Falabella in 2019, and that was further enhanced when we bought Best Day in 2020. We have developed an operating model and a specific technology platform for operating very light offline stores that make that channel extremely profitable.

So, as you know, as of last quarter, we opened the first Despegar stores in Argentina, we'll open five, and in Brazil [where Despegar operates under the Decolar brand], we'll open 10. Those offline sales, both offline stores and call centers, represent 13% of Despegar's bookings.

It's still very minor and we don't expect that to grow significantly. But because we are using those stores to capture consumers, and transform them into digi