Industry veteran Carl Livadas will drive enhanced automation and accelerate omni-channel bookings for clients.
SAN FRANCISCO – Sojern, travel's direct demand engine, announced the appointment of Carl Livadas as Vice President of Data Science and revealed that the company has delivered $10BN in direct bookings for customers since it began tracking the metric in 2014.
Livadas comes to Sojern to help the company accelerate the automation of its optimization methods, refined over years of managing direct demand campaigns for thousands of clients around the globe. The company's goal is twofold: To maximize the value of its real-time traveler profiles and across multiple channels; and to enhance performance by further automating pattern identification and optimization decisions.
"Sojern has an incredibly rich travel data set with tremendous predictive potential, and I'm excited to be joining the best data science team in the travel industry," said Livadas. "I look forward to helping Sojern leverage automation and machine learning in new ways to maximize the impact of this unique data in delivering results across ad channels. Building bleeding-edge solutions with complex data sets at this scale is one of the hardest and most compelling digital problems to tackle today."
Prior to Sojern, Livadas led the real-time machine learning and bid evaluation team at Nanigans and held data science and engineering leadership roles at Kayak. He holds five degrees from MIT, including a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Livadas is joining Sojern as the appetite for travel data and travel marketing is accelerating, with the US leisure travel market expected to reach $381 billion by the end of 2017, according to Deloitte, and travel and tourism expected to outperform the global economy throughout the next decade. In particular, as new trends in consumer search and booking behaviors emerge, travel brands are putting more emphasis on building direct relationships with customers and using data to deliver the best possible experiences for customers all the way through the purchase funnel.
"As travelers' path-to-purchase becomes exponentially more complex, brands are increasingly looking to reach travelers efficiently across channels, and they're relying on our Sojern Traveler Platform to do so," said Mark Rabe, CEO. "Over the past decade of partnering with top air, car, cruise, and hotel brands we've delivered more than $10B in direct bookings. With Carl's expertise with advanced optimization and automation techniques, we're looking to deliver an even greater share of direct bookings for our travel clients."
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