Delta Air Lines began offering travelers LivingSocial deals specific to their flights and trip dates, enabling travelers to sign up for them through the MyTrips portion of Delta.com.
This is LivingSocial's first deal with an airline, says Brendan Lewis, a LivingSocial spokesman.
When you have an upcoming Delta flight, you'll be able to go to the MyTrips section of Delta.com, where you can view and manage information about your flight, and you'll see a LivingSocial sign-up box at the bottom of the page. The box is autopopulated with you destination city. Travelers can enter their email addresses and home zip codes to sign up for LivingSocial deals.
LivingSocial will then email you deals for your destination city and when your trip ends, LivingSocial will ask you whether you'd like to receive its flash sales offers for your hometown, Lewis says.
So, if you're flying to Tampa on a Delta flight and spending a week there, you can opt in to receive LivingSocial deals for Tampa restaurants, spas and activities. You will be viewing all of the offers available for Tampa.
Paul Skrbec, a Delta spokesman, says the LivingSocial deals will be particularly useful for people who aren't very familiar with their destination city, and the partnership fits in with Delta's strategy to provide travelers with useful content on Delta.com.
Bringing LivingSocial to Delta.com is part of a slew of ecommerce initiatives, including flight bookings through Facebook, that the airline has undertaken over the last year or so.
Delta wrote about the LivingSocial partnership in the Delta Air Lines Blog.
It wouldn't be surprising to find LivingSocial striking additional airline or travel industry partnerships. Lewis of LivingSocial says "travel is in our DNA."
Meanwhile, another travel heavyweight, Expedia, is very upbeat about its new partnership with Groupon.
Dara Khosrowshahi, Expedia CEO, said during the company's second quarter earnings call July 28 that initial results from Groupon Getaways are "excellent."
He said the Groupon and Expedia sales teams are very focused on the partnership and "consumers are obviously very enthralled with the daily deals space."
Khosrowshahi said Expedia is learning from the early experience what kinds of deals work best.
He noted that The Palms in Las Vegas sold 5,000 Groupons hrough Groupon Getaways with Expedia, adding that domestic deals in popular tourist destinations appear to work better than international deals involving flights.
Khosrowshahi said this is a testing and learning phase for Groupon Getaways with Expedia.