Building Niche Advisor Communities to Grow Expedia Share of Wallet

This case study was created from an episode of the Product Marketing Adventure Podcast. It has been adapted into Dusted's case study format to preserve and showcase the guest's real-world experience. Written to preserve the voice of the true author, Cara Gravett.

TAAP is Expedia’s B2B platform built for travel advisors, many of whom are independent business owners booking travel on behalf of their clients. We had about 200,000 advisors globally, so we had strong reach, but they weren’t exclusive to Expedia. Most had multiple booking tools open on their desktops, and the needs of the client or trip often determined which one they chose.

That made community a little different for us. We weren’t just supporting users of a product. We were supporting business owners making daily decisions about where to book, how to grow their businesses, what they needed to learn, and who they trusted.

We had reach, but we weren’t always the go-to platform. Our goal was to increase share of wallet by helping advisors better understand and use the tools available to them.

One of the biggest challenges was education. We had products, features, and services advisors simply didn’t know existed. We had also tried a broader social approach to sharing product updates and campaigns, but it became too broad. Instead of creating meaningful engagement, it often created confusion and became more of a place for complaints.

At the same time, our advisors were globally dispersed, so we needed a way to stay connected and educate at scale without losing relevance.

We started getting much more specific.

We worked closely with our internal and third-party sales teams to understand what advisors were hearing, where the knowledge gaps were, and what challenges advisors were trying to solve. From there, we created smaller communities around more focused needs and used webinars and discussions to educate advisors while also gathering feedback.

We layered in content that was useful to them as business owners, including advisor trends, insights, and booking patterns. We also created a formal LMS (learning management system) so advisors had a structured place to learn about products and capabilities they may not have known were available, and we brought advisors into Expedia events and partnership experiences they had not historically been part of.

The biggest shift was that the community stopped being just us pushing information out.

Advisors started helping each other. They shared tips, answered questions, and talked about what was working in their own businesses. That peer-to-peer interaction made the community much more valuable, and ultimately much more sustainable.

We used audience and advisor feedback to identify needs and knowledge gaps; internal and third-party sales teams to bring in deeper customer context; smaller, targeted webinars and discussions; an LMS as a structured learning hub; advisor trends, insights, and booking data as useful business content; and existing Expedia events to create additional opportunities for connection.

It wasn’t one channel or platform that made the difference. It was using a mix of channels based on how advisors already wanted to engage, and making the experience increasingly relevant to the problems they were trying to solve.

We saw higher overall satisfaction, better product understanding, and an increase in share of wallet as advisors became more aware of how to use the platform and the tools available to them.

There was also an important secondary benefit. We had always done things like focus groups, but having a broader, ongoing community gave us a much better way to spot themes. We started seeing knowledge gaps, product gaps, and recurring customer needs early that we could bring back to product and marketing teams and address more quickly.

And once advisors started helping one another, the community became much more self-reinforcing. The value wasn’t dependent on Expedia creating every interaction. Members were creating value for each other.

That was probably the biggest lesson for me: start with the problem you’re trying to solve, not with the idea of building a community. Get specific about who it’s for and why they would show up. Smaller and more relevant can often be much more powerful than simply trying to build something big.