Steve Rowbotham is the founder and CEO of Navigator, a London-based travel commerce media business that aggregates more than 2bn travel signals from airlines and booking platforms into audiences any brand can buy.
In June 2026 the company appointed Paul Wright, who led the development of Uber Advertising across EMEA and APAC and held senior roles at Amazon, Apple and Sky, as an advisor to its board to help it scale. Before founding Navigator in 2020, Rowbotham rowed for Great Britain at two Olympic Games, winning bronze in the men’s double sculls at Beijing 2008 and racing in the quadruple sculls at London 2012.
He tells Business Matters why travel is the sharpest consumer signal there is, why a good interview is not the same as the right hire, and why you only ever need to know the next step.
What do you currently do at Navigator?
I am the founder of Navigator, the travel commerce media network. The idea is straightforward: how someone travels tells you who they are as a consumer. Where they go, how they book, what they spend on before they leave, what they do once they are there: that is a better signal of someone’s real spending power and intent than almost anything else you can buy.
The problem is that signal has always been scattered. An airline sees a piece of it. An OTA sees another piece. A hotel group sees a third. Nobody was putting it together.
That is what we do. We aggregate it into one identity per traveller, and we turn it into something any brand can use, not just airlines and hotel groups. We are already working with 22-plus of the biggest airlines and booking platforms to build that data, and we have aggregated it into more than 300m unique, known travellers and billions of individual signals. That is more people than Uber Ads or Walmart Connect reach.
My job splits into three things. The first is keeping the data and the product honest: we are selling known people, not impressions, so that has to actually be true. The second is doing the deals that build the identity graph and the deals that sell into it. The third is making the case, to the market and to the press, for why travel is the sharpest consumer signal there is.
What was the inspiration behind your business?
It came from seeing how fragmented travel data actually is. An airline holds one piece of who a traveller is, an OTA holds another, a hotel group holds a third, and none of them individually can tell you very much. Nobody was pulling those fragments together into something that actually described a person.
I could see that gap, and I could see that the value was not really in any single piece of travel data. It was in aggregating all of it into one identity that told you who someone is as a consumer, not just where they are flying. That is what became Navigator.
Who do you admire?
I do not fix on one person. I take the best bits from a lot of people, in business and in sport, and try to build my own version out of them.
Different people show you different things worth having, whether that is how someone handles pressure, how they make decisions with incomplete information, or just how they treat people when things are not going well. I would rather borrow the best of many than try to copy one.
Looking back, is there anything you would have done differently?
Hiring. Early on I put too much weight on how well someone performed in the interview itself, how polished the presentation was and how well they sold themselves in the room, rather than trusting what my gut was telling me underneath that.
A good interview and the right person are not the same thing, and I have learned that the hard way more than once. Now I trust the instinct first and treat the presentation as just one input, not the answer.
What defines your way of doing business?
Media has been commoditised and targeting has got harder, so most of the industry has responded by getting better at guessing. I would rather build the thing that removes the need for it.
Travel data is one of the most fragmented markets there is. An airline holds a piece of who you are. An OTA holds another piece. A hotel group, a metasearch site, a car hire company: everyone is sitting on a fragment, and none of them alone can tell you who someone really is.
Most of the industry just accepts that fragmentation and works around it. I do not think that is good enough. So we built the aggregator. We pull every one of those fragments together into one identity per traveller, built once and usable everywhere, rather than a brand having to piece together 20 partial pictures themselves.
The reason that matters goes beyond travel. Once you have aggregated the fragments, what you are left with is not a travel product, it is a consumer identity: more than 300m known people, built from billions of signals.
That is what lets non-endemic brands, the retailer, the bank, the car company, reach the same high-intent, high-spend person that travel brands have always had privileged access to, without needing a travel product of their own to sell.
What advice would you give to someone starting out?
You only need to know the next step. You do not need the whole plan mapped out before you start, and if you wait until you do, you will never start.
Take the step in front of you, and trust that once you have taken it, you will be able to see the one after that. Clarity comes from moving, not from thinking harder before you move.
That is how Navigator got built. Nobody hands you a finished map for aggregating a fragmented market. You take the first step you can actually see, and the next one becomes visible once you are standing there.
