Interview of Florian Colas – Co-founder Génération voyage
Hello Florian, we are delighted to interview you today. With 29 million visitors every year, 6000 articles referenced on your site, Generation Voyage is a key player in the sector. Created in 2017 with the following objectives:
- Making travel accessible to all by offering content without borders (Guides, tools & inspiration)
- Enable your readers to organise their trips independently.
We wanted to know more about your affiliation strategy and understand the interest of affiliation for a publisher and especially for Génération Voyage…Here we go!
Can you introduce yourself and tell us more about the history of Generation Travel and its vision?
Hi, I’m Florian Colas, co-founder and COO of Generation Travel, which is the media brand of the GC TECH group. The mission of our group is to improve the travel experience through technology! Generation Voyage was created in 2016 with the aim of providing the best travel experiences. Our readers come to Generation Voyage to find selections of activities in destinations, things to do, but also the right neighbourhood to stay in, good addresses on the spot… We aim to select the best experiences for them.
In 2021, our audience reached 29 million visitors, and we are recording a 60% growth in the first quarter of 2022.
What is the advantage for an e-merchant to work with you?
At Generation Voyage, we focus on selecting the best travel experiences. Our core business is to use our tourism expertise to give the reader the best of the destination he or she is researching.
All this while ensuring that we always meet the needs of our target readers, the 25-35 year olds.
This results in high quality content. This content strategy focused on the needs of our readers is perfectly aligned with the ROI objectives of the partners. Generation Voyage has always favoured models where performance is at the heart of the partnership: our audience is highly qualified, which translates into very interesting performances for the partner.
What is your business model? What are the types of partnerships you favour?
We have three business models :
- affiliation, which is now the dominant model for Generation Voyage ;
- media campaigns and promotional operations for destinations ;
- Programmatic advertising
For the subject that interests us today, affiliation, the types of partnerships that we favour are :
- platforms positioned on experiences. We are notably partners of Samboat, Abracadaroom, Ulysse, Wecandoo, Funbooker or even Campings.com ;
- partners who trust the power of content marketing ;
- platforms with sufficient catalogue depth to replicate the operation in several destinations ;
- platforms that see affiliation as a long-term investment.
Can you tell us why you chose the affiliation model and what it brings you today?
The affiliation model represents about 70% of Génération Voyage’s revenues. We have chosen this model because it is reliable and virtuous, both for the publisher and the advertiser.
When an affiliate partnership works, we tend to invest more in new content. Not only to boost performance, but also to enrich our media with content. As for the advertiser, his marketing develops thanks to us, the publishers, to whom we send a qualified audience. Since affiliation is a performance-based partnership, the advertiser has nothing to lose. The advertiser only pays the publisher commissions when sales have been generated.
Finally, I would add that affiliation is an advertising model that does not degrade the user experience, unlike display which can sometimes be intrusive. I would even say that the content associated with an affiliate program often enriches the user experience, since the offer proposed to readers is selected and complementary to the content consumed.
An advice to give to an advertiser in the “travel” sector who is hesitating to create a qualitative affiliate network? don’t hesitate to share a great success story
Affiliate marketing is a strong foundation for online travel acquisition. By creating an affiliate network and building strong relationships with publishers, an advertiser can ensure a recurring and sustainable volume of inbound business.
The advertiser can easily calculate the ROI of his campaigns and control the margin directly by affiliates and marketing actions.
Moreover, pure performance is not the only advantage of affiliation. This channel allows you to increase brand awareness among highly qualified audiences. Often, travellers consult several sites before taking action. If they identify your brand’s presence on several reference sites, it reinforces the brand image.
Our partnership with Samboat is certainly the most evocative: we started our collaboration in May 2021, and today Generation Voyage is the most important partner in France for Samboat in affiliation. This success has encouraged us to strengthen our content strategy around the boat, sailboat and catamaran experience on our site. We even had the opportunity to create a sponsorship project with a young sailor, The Sailing Frenchman, who participated in the Mini-Transat 2021.
What are the advantages of working with a platform like Affilae for Generation Travel?
There are several elements on Affilae that are highly valued as a publisher :
- the dashboard shows the performance of each advertiser, which makes it possible to analyse the performance of the previous day and the past months;
- the flexibility of commission allocation methods, and in particular commission sharing, makes it possible to obtain a fraction of the sale when we have contributed to it (where the last click policy sometimes has its limits);
- the centralisation of advertisers. We have partnerships with a dozen advertisers present on Affilae. It’s nice to have centralised reporting and billing;
- and finally the relationship with the Account Managers, which offers a closeness that is not found on large platforms. We can discuss our problems, our needs, talk to advertisers and this human side plays a role in the success of partnerships.
