L: I’m just starting out with a travel blog and want to get involved with TravelPayouts
Answer: Please, use this link: elearning.travelpayouts.com. After the registration, you’ll get a couple of emails just to help you onboard.
T: How I can get Omio API?
Answer: Omio’s API is not open doors to every single partner. A number of criteria shall be met, so, it’s a case-by-case consideration. Definitely, there needs to be a decent volume of traffic.
T: How I can get Omio price feed?
Answer: Potentially it’s an option. We haven’t discussed it internally. I think we can discuss that.
P: Are the Hotels.com data provided in your API?
Answer: Hotels.com API is not provided in the Omio’s API. Access to the Hotels.com API can be discussed with TP technical support. Please apply with your traffic sources and the number of unique users in a month.
С: Hi, Brain. Where I can download the SEO LPS template for my landings?
Answer: It’s not something we would like to communicate externally, but something to use internally. We’ve discussed creating some sorts of landing pages for affiliates with color branding, especially train. We’ve tailored some pages towards this mode of transport for instance. We still want to see a decent amount of traffic, which is verified traffic.
H: I loved Goeuro more. Why did you change the brand name?
Answer: The rebrand was driven by our aim to grow globally, and we’ve chosen a name that would sound nice in the majority of languages.
H: Are you from Berlin? Where are your most active markets?
Answer: Omio’s headquarters is in Berlin where it was born and raised. We have multiple offices. Our core markets are definitely Germany, UK, France, Spain, North America.
С: Brain, do you have any interesting examples from your affiliates? How they make money with you?
Answer: we work with a very traditional sack of partners, and we have cashback partners, we have loyalty programs and schemes, we have pure points programs, and we work with many voucher and coupon websites, and we work with really, really strong content websites, and blogs and we have a student program at place, and we work with some meta-search websites, and aggregators. Actually, a really broad set of affiliates.
A: What Omio’s products convert better? Trains, bus tickets, flights?
Answer: It’s different depending on the market. But the ground transport is our bread and butter, that’s what we started with. Our flights have been online only for a year. Trains are probably the best converting product. But in every single European market, we have pretty much 100% coverage for ground transport.
N: What are the Omio’s strengths? Do you care about the competition with the Trainline? It grows really fast
Answer: Our strength is making travel easy, and the reason we built this business is to help travelers. For example, if you went to most of the direct providers that we work with, they generally have horrible websites, confusing apps. We have tons of payment options, over 50 languages on site, it’s all about making the user experience really easy.
Touching on competition, yeah, we know Trainline really, really well. Trainline is very strong in the UK, we know that, and have half of the market share. They’ve been there for a long, long time. But we have some features that they definitely don’t have. We are going to make a big branding campaign in the UK soon, and we will highlight that our platform is much stronger than the Trainline’s.
A: Are Omio’s tools available in many languages? I work with Asians travelers mostly.
Answer: We have a Chinese domain launched just a week ago, and we launched our Japan and Korean domains. That will expand over time. Our goal is to become global.
A: From which countries most of your affiliates are? Europe?
Answer: Omio’s biggest markets are Europe and North America.
U: Do you have a white label?
Answer: There have been some discussions internally, we are taking step by step approach. I’m gonna give you a small insight: it’s gonna be more on a B2B side. We don’t class it as “affiliate” and we’ll focus more on our direct partners. It’s work in progress, we haven’t launched it yet.
G: Android SDK?
Answer: Potentially, but, unfortunately, I’m not on the app side.
U: What’s a percentage of your Android and IOS users?
Answer: Even split, 50/50.
C: Why don’t you work with Portugal railway company?
Answer: Well, these are commercial agreements that we can’t get into detail now, but some of direct Portugal train companies are quite difficult to onboard. We are in discussions with all these providers, it just takes time.
C: Do you have API with routes data? Prices, cities, time in the way?
Answer: Prices, cities, etc yes this is available. Look to book ratio’s not shareable.
P: Could you share the most popular routes in Poland?
Answer: TBC. FYI, as mentioned during the webinar we have limited coverage here. We have 3 bus aggregators that give us meaningful but not comprehensive bus coverage. All train providers are state owned with zero on Omio at present. We hope to change this over time of course.
U: What’s your market share in Germany?
Answer: Germany’s market has been hugely represented by Deutsch Bahn, and we have Deutsch Bahn on site, they are a direct provider of ours. In terms of bus, Germany is very heavily represented by Flixbus, and Flixbus our particular partner where they always want to own the users, so we place Flixbus on our site but the booking happens outside, and that’s pretty much all ground transport when it comes to ground transport in Germany. We have both of the biggest providers on our website, so our market share is pretty high.
D: Why did you choose to work with Travelpayouts compared to other Affiliate networks that are out there?
Answer: I joined Omio when Travelpayouts was already there. And it’s been a very open and communicative relationship. We are happy with it, long may it last!
A: What was your highest payout at TP?
Answer: Around 4,000 euros/per month.
U: How to gain 1 mln? 🙂
Answer: Start with making good content.
M: Does your API provide information in real-time or it’s a cached data?
Answer: Real-time data.
M: How can I build an affiliate link to the exact page not to the main one? For example to the exact ticket?
Answer: Find the ticket you are interested in, copy the URL in the address bar and paste it into the custom link generator to create an affiliate link.
M: Could I retarget traffic to my own website to sell the tickets? I read in your rules that retargeting is forbidden, but does it valid only for retargeting on your website or on my website too?
Answer: Generally, we don’t want our affiliates to use the same paths as our display channels.
P: What do mean by merchant page?
Answer: It’s a separate page devoted to Omio and its services within any other website.
Market-related questions
- Is there any plan for Africa?
- Why you people won’t concentrate in India? Its huge market.
- How can we connect while we are in Africa?
- Are you open for a joint venture in the Philippines?
- What about having a joint venture in India?
- Tell more on your new markets plans please.
- Are interested to launch your business in Pakistan?
- When will you launch in LATAM?
Answer: well, it’s not possible to provide any exact dates, but the company is planning to gain a higher market share in North America and South America. Unfortunately, Asian countries are not on the radar any time soon.
