Retail Media Age speaks with Sonal Kalra, Revenue Director at Trainline, to find out how the company’s one-year anniversary of its foray into retail media is helping the travel company diversify its offering, engage more deeply with consumers as well as tap into new revenue streams.
It’s a year since Trainline officially launched its retail media strategy, what was the thinking behind it?
One of the leading thoughts behind it was that travel — and the rail tickets that are being booked on our platform – are not just transactions, but journeys that a customer is taking. And that, with each journey a customer is taking on Trainline, we have access to a verified audience who’s on the move, has clear intent around where they’re going and why.
When you combine that with broader shifts in the advertising industry, such as the move toward first-party data, privacy and brand-safe environments, and attention-based measurement – it felt like a real opportunity for Trainline to bridge the two. We can help brands engage travellers in meaningful, high-context moments along their journey.
Where does the proposition sit within the wider Trainline ecosystem?
Our retail media strategy is one of three strategic revenue diversification levers that we’re trying to build out at Trainline. The others are building a suite of ancillary products that give customers protection and peace of mind on their journeys, and our continual testing with strategic partners in other travel verticals – enabling customers to book more of their trip beyond the rail ticket with Trainline.
All of these initiatives deepen customer engagement on our platform and also open up new monetisation routes for us. This reinforces our longer-term ambition of evolving into a broader travel ecosystem for both customers and partners.
How does this proposition differ from more “traditional” retail media networks?
Trainline’s media platform goes beyond the traditional retail media approach of primarily reaching customers at the point of purchase. Instead, we enable advertisers to connect with a highly engaged audience during two unique moments — when they are planning travel and when they are on their way to a particular destination.
For advertisers, that means access to a highly contextual opportunity: we’re not just offering reach, but relevance. We understand who our customers are, where they’re going, and often why they’re travelling — whether it’s for work, for a concert, or a weekend away with family. This allows brands to deliver messages that are not only targeted but timely and meaningful in the context of a journey. For customers, it means seeing content that genuinely adds value to their travel experience — from inspiration for their destination to offers that make their journey more enjoyable.
As a non-traditional retail media proposition, are there advertisers your proposition particularly appeals to? Which brands should be interested and why?
We work with both endemic and non-endemic brands, but the value proposition for each differs.
For endemic brands — within travel and mobility — Trainline’s performance-led media solutions help drive measurable outcomes. We can reach high-intent travellers right across the journey, from inspiration to planning and can convert these into bookings.
For non-endemic brands, the opportunity is about contextual engagement and cultural relevance. Our audience isn’t just travelling — they’re going somewhere for a particular purpose— whether it’s a regular commute or travelling on matchday to support your team — and this enables brands to speak to customers at the right moment with the right message. For some industries, such as Entertainment & Streaming, the proposition is a really clear fit. For others, it is more about using Trainline as a platform to connect with customers around a key cultural moment or travel purpose.
Take football for instance — it is one of the UK’s biggest cultural passions and a great intersection between travel and lifestyle. Over one in five UK adults travel over an hour to football matches each year, and half of those journeys are done by rail. For the remaining 50%, 83% are interested in switching to train travel. This presents a really interesting opportunity for brands across many industries to get behind a cultural moment and also support positive behavioural shift.
We believe our proposition has broad appeal across both endemic and non-endemic brands.
How are partnerships with the likes of PubMatic and Scope3 helping to further your mission?
Our partnership strategy is two-fold.
One is to use partners to increase the credibility of our media proposition. With Scope3, we are using them to increase our credibility around measurement by embedding carbon-aware measurement into campaign delivery, and aligning with the growing demand from advertisers for accountability around this measure.
The other part of our partnership strategy is to use strategic partners to give us scale. We’re new to this. We don’t have a huge, scaled organisation behind go-to-market. Our partnership with PubMatic helps us leverage their scale and expertise in audience monetisation to help bring us to market in a privacy-safe way.
What other developments can we expect to see in year two?
One of our key priorities is to create innovative and impactful propositions for advertisers. Recently, we launched Journey Ads, which is our first foray into this. However, we’re taking this further in the coming months focusing very much on what makes Trainline unique.
We are thinking about how we create a proposition that allows a brand to own a travel intent moment, so there’s more to come in that space. Creating new and innovative propositions is one thing that you can expect to see more from us.
The second is much stronger audience capabilities. Harnessing all of that information we have on intent around travel, and the understanding of our customers that we’ve built over more than 20 years, to create deep, rich audiences that advertisers can leverage to achieve both reach and relevance. These audiences can be activated both on Trainline and off-site as well.
