How Uplift works: the retail media platform built specifically for OTAs and tour operators

Retail media is rapidly becoming one of the most important new commercial models in travel. OTAs, tour operators, and travel retailers are increasingly looking beyond traditional co-marketing toward scalable media networks built around first-party audiences, supplier partnerships, and monetisable onsite inventory.

But travel retail media operates differently from traditional ecommerce retail media.

Unlike standard retail environments, travel retailers operate across multiple source markets, live inventory systems, seasonal availability, tourism board partnerships, hotel co-marketing agreements, and merchandising environments that constantly shift based on destination demand and bookability.

Why travel retail media requires different infrastructure

Many of the retail media platforms now entering travel were originally designed for ecommerce retailers or marketplaces. That works reasonably well for standard sponsored placements, but travel introduces a different commercial and operational model.

An OTA is not managing static product inventory. It is managing live availability, destination demand, supplier-funded campaigns, source-market complexity, and partnerships that often span multiple regions simultaneously.

The result is that many travel businesses still manage partnership campaigns, reporting, inventory, and supplier workflows across disconnected systems that were never really designed around how travel partnerships operate in practice.

Travel retail media also operates against live inventory conditions. A hotel, route, or package holiday available this morning may no longer be bookable by the afternoon. Advertising infrastructure therefore needs to work alongside live inventory systems, suppressing or prioritising campaigns dynamically based on real-time availability rather than serving static placements disconnected from what can actually be sold.

As explored in our articles on retail media for OTAs and tour operators, modernising OTA co-marketing, and why siloes are the enemy of partnership growth, the challenge for travel businesses is no longer simply whether supplier-funded media exists. The challenge is building the infrastructure required to scale it operationally across markets, teams, suppliers, and channels.

Uplift by Platform 195 was built specifically around those travel retail media workflows.

Rather than adapting generic commerce media tooling to fit travel, Uplift was designed from the ground up for OTAs, tour operators, airlines, and travel retailers managing supplier-funded campaigns across onsite and offsite media environments.

The platform consists of three connected products:

• Uplift Hub: campaign management and partnership operations
• Uplift Ads: onsite ad serving and merchandising
• Uplift Ads+: audience extension across external media channels

Together, Uplift provides a unified travel retail media platform for OTAs and tour operators looking to scale supplier-funded campaigns, partnership revenue, and owned media operations. The platform was built specifically around the operational realities of travel commerce.

Uplift Hub: campaign management built around travel partnership operations

Uplift Hub is the operational layer at the centre of the ecosystem. It gives OTA partnerships and co-marketing teams a single platform to manage the entire campaign lifecycle: pipeline management, campaign creation, line-item setup, creative approval, trafficking, pacing, reporting, proof of delivery, and revenue tracking.

Source market is a native operational field throughout the platform architecture.

This matters because most major OTAs operate across multiple source markets simultaneously. In many organisations, individual regional teams still manage supplier activity independently, creating fragmented reporting, duplicated workflows, and limited visibility across the wider partnership operation.

Uplift was designed to solve this operational challenge.

Teams can manage campaigns, reporting, inventory, and partner activity across all source markets from a single environment, creating the conditions for genuinely scalable partnership programmes.  

TUI identified exactly this challenge before implementing Uplift. Prior to deployment, source markets were operating independently, limiting visibility and restricting the business’s ability to commercialise scale across regions. Following implementation, TUI delivered three times the partnership revenue in the first six months of the financial year compared to the entire previous year.

Campaigns within Uplift Hub are structured around two campaign types:

• Blended campaigns: packaged media plans that deliver seamlessly across channels, optimising based on inventory availability, performance, and margin
• Custom campaigns: bespoke supplier media plans built from scratch

Each line item represents an individual advertising product with associated fields for source market, targeting, dates, pricing model, units, and delivery tracking.

The platform also includes a full audit log across campaigns and line items, providing visibility into every operational change across the partnership workflow.

Reporting and operational visibility

Uplift Hub includes centralised reporting across campaign delivery, pacing, revenue, margin, and partner performance.

For partnership teams managing hundreds of concurrent supplier campaigns, the platform also includes built-in proof-of-delivery and compliance tooling, removing much of the manual operational overhead that traditionally sits behind OTA co-marketing programmes.

Dashboards support visibility across both commercial and operational performance, including campaign pacing, delivery tracking, booked versus delivered revenue, and line-item level reporting.

All reporting dashboards support CSV export and filtering by source market, channel, platform, account, and campaign status.

Uplift Ads: onsite advertising built for travel retailers

Uplift Ads is the ad server that delivers advertising across an OTA’s owned channels. The platform uses server-side integration, meaning ads load as part of the OTA’s own environment rather than through third-party ad calls.

This protects the booking experience from the latency and friction often associated with traditional client-side ad serving, while also helping bypass ad blockers.

Supported formats include sponsored listings, display, carousels, video, merchandising, and email advertising. Rather than relying on standard IAB advertising units, formats are built natively around each OTA’s booking environment and site design.

Commercial models supported include Sponsorships, CPM, CPC, and auction-based placements.

Uplift Ads also handles one of the more important operational realities in travel retail media: live inventory availability.

When targeting returns a list of hotel IDs matching a campaign’s criteria, the OTA’s inventory system can cross-reference those results against real-time availability. Campaigns can therefore be dynamically suppressed or prioritised based on what is actually bookable, rather than serving advertising against sold-out or stop-sale inventory.

Uplift Ads+: audience extension beyond owned media

Uplift Ads+ is Platform 195’s audience extension product, allowing OTAs and tour operators to activate campaigns beyond their owned inventory across external media channels.

Supported environments include programmatic display, paid social, connected TV, digital out-of-home, proximity mobile, and digital audio.

Uplift Ads+ works with both first-party audience data and third-party audience segments to support broader targeting by geography, intent, and traveller behaviour.

This allows tourism boards, hotel groups, and travel partners to reach high-intent audiences beyond the OTA’s own onsite inventory while still benefiting from the retailer’s audience data and travel intent signals.

Hays Travel, the UK’s largest independent travel agent, used Uplift Ads+ and first-party audience data to build a tourism board partnership proposition from scratch. Tourism boards that had previously overlooked Hays began treating the business as a credible national media and partnership channel.

Onsite and offsite activity are managed through the same campaign structure within Uplift Hub, creating a unified view across supplier campaigns, media performance, and reporting.

Managed service and self-serve options

Uplift Hub is operated directly by the OTA’s own partnership and commercial teams. For travel retailers requiring additional support, Platform 195 also provides a fully managed service covering commercialisation, campaign management, ad operations, media buying, and creative delivery.

Rather than acting as a separate agency layer, the managed service model is designed to operate as an extension of the retailer’s own commercial team.

Sunweb used this approach to grow hotel co-marketing revenue by more than 200% year-on-year, reducing campaign launch timelines from weeks to days.

For OTAs looking to open campaign booking directly to suppliers, Uplift also supports custom-built self-serve partnership portals. These portals allow hotel groups, tourism boards, and partners to create campaigns, manage targeting, upload creative, and monitor reporting independently, with built-in QA workflows, AI-assisted optimisation, and automated reporting.

Integration and implementation

Uplift integrates with existing OTA technology stacks through server-side implementation, supporting real-time campaign tracking and delivery alongside existing marketing systems.

Role-based access controls support the different operational functions typically involved in OTA partnership programmes, including sales, ad operations, campaign management, creative, finance, and reporting teams.

Platform 195 manages onboarding and implementation directly, with most OTAs able to launch within approximately three months depending on integration complexity.

The future of travel retail media infrastructure

As retail media matures within travel, the underlying infrastructure requirements are becoming clearer. OTAs and tour operators are not simply adding advertising placements to existing websites. They are building supplier-funded media ecosystems spanning partnerships, inventory, audiences, reporting, and multi-market operations.

Uplift was designed specifically around those travel retail media requirements, combining campaign management, onsite advertising, audience extension, and partnership operations within a platform built exclusively for the travel industry.

To find out how Uplift could work for your OTA or travel retail business, get in touch with the Platform 195 team.

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