Guest · Partnerships and sponsorship
Justin Reid
Senior Media Director, International Markets (EMEA and APAC), Tripadvisor
Justin Reid leads international media partnerships at Tripadvisor, the world’s largest travel guidance platform with 450 million monthly users and over one billion reviews. He has been at Tripadvisor for over eleven years, after thirteen years at VisitBritain, where he built its early digital and social media presence. His conviction is that trust, once earned at scale, is the most powerful commercial asset a brand can possess.
About
Justin Reid is Senior Media Director for International Markets covering EMEA and APAC at Tripadvisor, where he has worked since November 2014. He oversees the company’s commercial media and partnerships business across destination marketing organisations, hotel partners, travel brands, and travel-adjacent brands outside North America. He is also a board member of IAB UK and a member of the Tourism Ireland GB Marketing Group and London & Partners Tourism Advisory Group.
Justin spent thirteen years at VisitBritain, where he built and led the organisation’s digital and social media marketing from its earliest days, launching social campaigns that won accolades including Best Tourist Board on Twitter, building a subscribed database of 2.6 million users, and developing what was at the time a pioneering social commerce strategy. Before joining Tripadvisor, he spent time at Betapond, a Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer working with travel and tourism brands, and AIA Worldwide.
At Tripadvisor, his most cited recent work is the Mars Petco partnership: a collaboration built from post-pandemic insight that pet ownership had surged and that new pet owners had significant anxieties about travelling with or leaving their pets. Tripadvisor introduced pet-friendly review filters, a pet-friendly property accreditation scheme, and the first Travellers’ Choice Award for best destinations for pets. The Abu Dhabi and Morocco experiential events, held on the Alternet and the South Bank respectively, are examples of how Justin’s team uses Tripadvisor’s Wonderlab creative studio to take destination advertising off the platform and into physical spaces.
Career28 years
- 2023 to now Tripadvisor Senior Media Director, International Markets (EMEA and APAC)
- 2021 to 2023 Tripadvisor Director of Media, Destinations, Hotels and Growth
- 2018 to 2021 Tripadvisor Director of Destination Marketing, EMEA
- 2014 to 2021 Tripadvisor Head of Destination Management, EMEA
Show earlier roles: Betapond (Facebook PMD), VisitBritain
- 2012 to 2014 Betapond (Facebook PMD) Client Services Director and Director of Facebook Marketing
- 1998 to 2011 VisitBritain Head of Digital and Social Media
How Justin thinks3 convictions
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Trust earned through authentic reviews is brand equity that can be lent to partners
Tripadvisor’s commercial proposition to brand partners is built on a form of trust that is unusual in the media landscape: it is not claimed, it is earned through a billion verified reviews and validated by users who know the platform’s standards. When a brand operates inside that ecosystem, whether as a sponsor of the Travellers’ Choice Awards, a partner in an experiential event, or a destination that uses Wonderlab to take reviews off the screen and into physical spaces, it inherits some of that trust. Justin’s argument is that this is the one brand association that no paid media can manufacture.
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Adjacent brand partnerships beat direct category targeting when backed by audience insight
The Mars Petco partnership with Tripadvisor is the clearest example of Justin’s audience-first approach to partnerships. Mars is not a travel brand. But Mars’s core audience is. The post-pandemic insight about pet owner anxiety around travel unlocked a partnership that generated genuine utility: pet-friendly filters, accreditation, and the best destinations for pets Travellers’ Choice Award. Justin’s point is that the most interesting partnerships are the ones that emerge from audience insight rather than category proximity.
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Post-pandemic travellers want experiences, not escapes from the desk
The behavioural shift Justin has tracked through Tripadvisor’s data since the pandemic is one of the most commercially significant in travel. The volume and complexity of experience bookings on Viator, Tripadvisor’s experiences platform, reflect a consumer who is not travelling to rest from their desk but to do something memorable that connects them to a place or a culture. This shift towards experience over accommodation as the primary driver of destination choice is why Tripadvisor’s strategic priority is building a single platform for planning, booking, and experiencing that journey end to end.
