In our Meet the Team series, we get to know different members of the Koddi team through an informal interview. This time, I sat down with one of Koddi’s most experienced team members, Deep Kohli, Sr. Director of Client Services, to discuss our partnerships with the leading metasearch publishers and how we prioritize our clients’ goals and objectives.

Tell us about your background, and what led you to Koddi?

I have a finance degree, so I’m not necessarily molded from the marketing industry, but I’ve gained my marketing expertise by working within companies. I started in a financial services firm managing email marketing campaigns. I then moved on to Travelocity as an analyst where I developed my marketing chops and gained an intimate understanding of the metasearch space while managing various metasearch channels. After moving to Europe for an opportunity in the digital marketing space, I had the chance to come back to Texas and work with Koddi in its growth and expansion.

I know you love to travel! What places do you tend to revisit, and where have you only been once but would love to visit again?

So, I rarely go back to the same place twice because I like to explore new places. There are around 200 countries in the world, so I avoid going to the same places twice for a vacation. I’m an explorer by nature. I travel off the beaten path mostly, preferring adventurous destinations over big cities. The best time I’ve had was actually in Morocco. The trip was booked two weeks out, and I had done absolutely no research on the place. When we got there, we had no hotel reservation–nothing. We just had a car and a map, and we hit the road. We explored the whole country and had the best time. Amazing people, amazing adventures, amazing stories.

How have your travel experiences changed the way you see the industry?

By traveling so much, you become more and more curious about how things work. I’m always interested in the operations behind the hotel and airline industries. That curiosity fits very well within the work that we do at Koddi. At the end of the day, we help clients optimize their business, and understanding the customer’s perspective allows us to do that better. I’m able to put myself in their shoes because I travel a lot. I think, “What are the things I do, what are the things I look for when I’m trying to book a hotel or vacation?” This all makes it a little easier to bring that perspective into our client engagements.

Could you walk us through some of the gains a publisher can see when working closely with a company like Koddi?

As we work with a variety of customers, we sit in a unique position to understand the trends in the industry and across different regions. This vantage point allows us to identify commonalities, to discuss them with our publisher partners, and help come up with new products, bid levers, or anything else that can move the needle for our clients. Because we represent a bulk of suppliers and OTAs, our recommendations have a much larger impact for our publishers.

How does Koddi prioritize our publisher relationships to ensure our products and services work for our customers?

First and foremost, we strive to understand the client’s goals and objectives and tie those things back to the offerings available at Koddi and the publisher support we have. Sometimes, there are additional challenges that may not be obvious initially. For example, limited technical capabilities can prevent a client from working with a specific publisher or using certain publisher features. With a clear understanding of the customer’s needs, Koddi can work on the rest of the pieces to ensure our clients meet their objectives.

As a leader in travel technology, how does Koddi work to inform our publishers’ decisions and what value does this provide for our customers?

Our relationships with our customers are very transparent, as we constantly work to grow their business by focusing on the strategic areas they care about. Throughout this process, not only do we continue to engage with our clients on a regular basis, but we also engage with our publishers in terms of achieving those growth goals. As an example, we have regular summits with our publishers which allow us to share some of our findings and brainstorm ideas for new products. Oftentimes, we’re granted early access to new publisher tools and features, and we are able to get our clients enrolled in alphas and betas. Number one, to test it out. Number two, to help our clients shape the future of those products. That shaping of the future is one of the more powerful things Koddi can provide because of our close relationships with our publishers.

With such a diverse set of publishers that we work with, how does Koddi leverage our access to provide efficient investment opportunities for our customers?

This goes back to understanding the client’s goals and objectives, understanding what’s most important to their business, specifically what type of bookings they care about the most. If, for example, a client has hotels in resort locations that cater to families, a certain type of publisher will work better to drive these specific bookings. The client’s needs help us prioritize what publishers and what opportunities to leverage in order to drive successful growth.

What should both our publishers and customers look forward to as Koddi moves forward in the industry?

What we’re trying to do at Koddi is simplify the travel ecosystem one piece at a time. If you look back at our history, we started with Google, then we moved to cover all other metasearch optimizations. With the acquisition of the Criteo travel business in 2018, we began to offer the Koddi Private Markets solution, allowing independent hotels to work with their corporate teams to maximize revenue. And now, we are expanding into Koddi Ads by creating new opportunities for our customers to grow their business.

As we look forward, we want to continue to understand the needs of our customers and come up with innovative solutions to drive growth. A lot of the things we’ve done over time come from the needs of the clients versus our own speculations. It’s this understanding of our clients’ requirements coupled with our publisher relationships that allows us to come up with something better.

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Keep an eye out for our next team interview in this blog series. You can subscribe to our email newsletter to stay informed of the latest content from the Koddi blog.