Why your long tail partnerships aren’t scaling and how to fix it

In the race to secure high-value partnerships with major hotel chains and DMOs, most OTAs and tour operators overlook their most significant commercial opportunity, the long tail.

Those hundreds, often thousands, of smaller hotel partners that make up the majority of your portfolio are usually treated as background infrastructure. They provide breadth and fill gaps but they're rarely seen as a meaningful source of growth.

But according to Roy Stratford, Director of Retail Media at Platform 195, this isn't because the opportunity doesn't exist.

"The long tail often represents the largest addressable partnership opportunity in the business. Yet the cost and complexity of activating it means most of that value is never realised. Travel businesses are leaving significant revenue on the table because the model itself doesn't scale,” says Roy.

Many travel businesses try to solve this by adding resource. That approach fails because the constraint isn’t people, it’s the model underpinning the activity.

The problem is structural, not strategic

Spend time inside most travel businesses and the pattern is all too familiar. Partnerships are typically handled on a case-by-case basis, campaigns are built from scratch and commercial conversations are shaped around what each partner wants, rather than what the business can scale. It works well enough for a small number of high-value relationships, but beyond that it becomes slow, expensive, and inconsistent.

The challenge runs deeper than resourcing alone. In most organisations the long tail doesn't sit cleanly anywhere - partnerships teams manage the relationships, marketing delivers the campaigns, and commercial owns the revenue, but no single team owns the model end-to-end.

When each partnership requires significant manual effort, the return per partner looks marginal, so focus naturally shifts to a smaller number of high-value deals.

The result is a structural mismatch. It's often the longtail partners that need the most attention, they're battling for exposure in competitive markets and looking to their travel retail partners for support. Yet the cost and complexity of activating them at scale means they get consistently deprioritised, or at best maintained as a relationship exercise rather than a commercial one.

Why this matters now

This challenge has always existed, but what's changed is the commercial imperative to solve it.

"Retail media is moving out of the marketing function and into the commercial engine of the business. That's when it really starts to scale. Once retail media becomes a growth engine, it has to stand up to the same scrutiny as any other commercial line, which is a mindset shift as much as a capability shift," explains Roy.

Across the travel industry, businesses that have made this shift are seeing transformational results. Tour operators and hotel groups have increased their media partnership revenue by up to eight times by building ecosystems that leverage customer intent data throughout the complete buying lifecycle, not just post-booking.

Airlines are following suit, recognising that their first-party data represents a multi-million dollar opportunity if activated through the right model.

For partnerships leaders, this creates both pressure and opportunity. The long tail can no longer be treated as a side project or relationship maintenance - it needs to deliver commercial returns at scale.

But achieving that requires a fundamentally different operating model to the one most organisations are running today.

What's possible now with the right model

The shift Roy and his team have seen work in practice, across 30+ travel and retail clients, centres on creating packages where delivery can be automated from end to end.

As he explains, the principles are straightforward. When there's commonality in what you're selling across channels, the entire process, from booking to post-campaign reporting, can run seamlessly without manual intervention.

"The ability to create packages where the channels s and processes for each are automated or dynamic is what unlocks the long tail,” explains Roy.

On paper, that sounds straightforward. In reality, it depends on having the right combination of technology, a well-designed and easy to understand proposition, and an operating model that allows everything to work together at scale.

On the technology side, modern retail media platforms can automate campaign setup, creative trafficking, delivery optimisation and reporting in ways that simply weren’t possible five years ago.

The key is integration. When your campaign management, ad serving and analytics connect into unified workflows, the manual handoffs that slow everything down disappear. What previously took a team member two days of work now happens automatically.

But technology alone isn't enough. The proposition itself needs to be designed for scale.

“This means moving away from fully bespoke campaigns towards more structured, repeatable solutions that partners can understand quickly and buy with confidence,” says Roy.

When the offer is clear and consistent, the process becomes simpler for both sides. Sales conversations speed up, delivery becomes more efficient, and the entire model starts to operate at a scale that simply isn’t possible when every partnership is treated as a one-off.

This is where many approaches fall short. Generic advertising platforms don’t account for the realities of travel — seasonal demand patterns, the role of DMOs, the complexity of hotel partnerships, and the fact that many partners aren’t experienced media buyers.

"It's strategic theory but actually how you execute it underneath is what we really bring. You can tell people the principles, but without travel-specific expertise and the right systems, you can't execute at scale,” notes Roy.

When these three elements come together, the economics change completely. Growth is no longer constrained by headcount because delivery is automated.

Campaigns that previously took weeks to get off the ground now go live in days. And critically, the model frees up your partnerships team to focus their time where it genuinely matters - on the top-tier strategic relationships that still need a hands-on, customised approach.

The commercial proof

For companies that have invested in building a scalable long tail model, the results speak for themselves. Sunweb, one of Europe's leading tour operators, rebuilt its hotel co-marketing approach around this model and has seen revenue from hotel partnerships grow by over 200% year on year.

Around 99% of their hotel partners now buy off-the-shelf packages, the process from confirmed sale to live campaign takes just a few days, and high repeat rates among partners demonstrate that the packages consistently deliver value.

Read the full Sunweb case study.

This isn't an isolated example. Across the industry, travel businesses that have made this shift are seeing similar patterns - rapid revenue growth, high partner satisfaction, streamlined operations and the ability to scale without proportional increases in headcount.

Where bespoke still matters

None of this suggests that customisation becomes irrelevant. Top-tier partnerships with major hotel chains, strategic DMOs and flagship airline partners still require bespoke approaches, detailed negotiation and tailored campaign strategies. Additionally, non-endemic brand partnerships will always have their nuances requiring a little more attention.

“These relationships drive significant individual value and deserve the time and attention they require. The difference is that when your long tail operates through a scalable model, it frees up the capacity to give your top-tier partnerships the focus they deserve,” says Roy.

You're no longer spreading thin resources across hundreds of relationships - you're deploying them strategically where customisation genuinely drives incremental value.

The model isn't one-size-fits-all, it's fit-for-purpose. Long tail gets efficiency and scale, top-tier gets strategic focus and flexibility, and both deliver stronger commercial outcomes as a result.

What senior leaders should do next

For most partnerships and commercial leaders, the challenge is less about recognising the opportunity and more about knowing where to start and how to approach it without creating more complexity in the process.

The first step is clarity. Not on what the long tail could deliver in theory, but what it’s delivering today in practice, and what promotional needs exist.

“How much revenue is it generating? How much resource is it consuming? And crucially, where is the friction sitting — in the proposition, the process, or the systems that support it? These are the questions to start with,” says Roy.

From there, the question becomes less about optimisation and more about design. If the long tail were built from the ground up as a revenue stream, what would it look like? What would you sell, how would it be delivered, and what would need to change internally to make that model viable at scale?

This is where many organisations get stuck. The principles are well understood, but translating them into something that works, commercially, operationally, and across teams, is a different challenge altogether.

This is the point where support becomes critical. Not in defining the strategy, but in building the model underneath it: shaping the proposition, aligning teams, integrating systems, and delivering campaigns in a way that is both scalable and sustainable.

That’s the gap Platform 195 is helping clients with, turning strategy into something that works at scale.

About Platform 195

Platform 195 powers travel retailers to build scalable partnerships and connect with travellers globally. We uplift partnerships and amplify brand messaging through travel-first technology, world-class creative, and a global media network that drives measurable growth.

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