Market Sector: Travel
Customer: Travel2
Campaign: Holiday of a Lifetime!
Overview
Travel2 (part of the Stella Travel Group) are a specialist travel operator who offer tailor made holidays and bespoke travel services through 2,500 independent travel agents across the UK, with no direct sales channel.
The travel industry is incredibly competitive with many (if not all) travel operators having to think of additional means of generating incremental revenue from both new and existing customers over and above existing foot fall via their shops.
The Issue
The independent travel agents tended to view and sell Travel2 as a ‘flight only’ business with very little cross sell activity happening at a local level. Travel2 therefore had a strong desire to cross sell additional services such as hotels, excursions and transfers (such as cabs to the hotel from the airport) and create a much stronger brand awareness across all products to both the travel agents and the end consumer.
Being as Travel2 is not able to market directly to their customer’s customer i.e. the travel agents customers, the ability to up and cross sell was very limited and really down to the travel agent doing a good job on Travel2’s behalf at the point of sale. All of the above led to a much greater degree of hand holding being required in the form of a localised marketing initiative.
Our Solution
Our primary objective was to increase Travel2 sales across all products (flights, hotels, excursions and transfers) as well as fully rectify all the issues above and ensure that a strong return of marketing investment was realised whilst leveraging the sales opportunity.
The brief, therefore, was simple! Produce a two stage, single communication piece that is eye catching, engaging, personalised and timely that would form two purposes. Firstly we needed to engage and incentivise the travel agents to sell more products. In addition, acknowledge the end consumers original booking and create greater brand awareness to the travel agent of the Travel 2 brand and what it stood for.
The second part of the communication needed to really get the travel agents to ‘buy in’ so that they were keen to forward the promotion onto their consumer (and follow up via a telephone call a day or so later if they so wish). Most importantly the communication needed to encourage and pull the consumer back in-store so the agent could then push Travel2’s products harder than ever before and, in turn, sell additional Travel2 services.
As well as all this, a localised piece of direct marketing would help to hand hold agents at a local level and really get them to buy into the Travel2 brand.
Each piece consisted of a voucher that the travel agent kept detailing additional commission that could be earned off the back to the original booking. The second piece (supplied as a second item within the polywraped pack) is for the travel agent to post off to his or her customer. This piece has been fully customised with the travel agents details including contact name, telephone number (not Travel2’s), as well as up/cross sell promotions for hotels, excursions and transfers that directly relate to the customers level of booking. For example if an economy class flight was booked then 2 and 3 star hotels are promoted. If a business class flight is booked then 3 and 4 star hotels are promoted and for 1st class flights then 4 and 5 star hotels are shown. This is then followed through in respect of price points for excursions and so on.
The Result
The campaign really helped to pull the customer back in-store and enabled the travel agents to follow up the promotion personally. This resulted in a significant increase in hotel bookings (up 24%). The travel agents loved the help Travel2 gave them with their marketing and increased sales (and of course the additional commission).
The piece has received some great feedback in trade related press. “Our customers consumers loved the personal touch the piece provided” - Alasdair Farrimond (Travel2 Marketing Director).
Travel2 now has much stronger brand awareness and the travel agents are now pushing Travel2 brand over and above other brands as they feel that Travel2 are really helping them to market their own business.
The original mailing was so successful that a high number of travel agents have asked Travel2 to send the piece directly to the end consumer and for those agents we now do so and send the voucher details to them via an html email.
“We had a high number of short term marketing objectives, and at the time it was unclear as to how we were going to solve all of them. Inc Direct not only delivered in respect of coming up with the right solution but as a direct result of this particular initiative our hotel bookings alone went up 24% in the first 3 months compared to this period last year” - Alasdair Farrimond (Travel2 Marketing Director).
Over 500 mailers and emails are produced weekly across multiple destinations. XMPie drives all the variable data and content. The pack is printed on two iGen3 digital presses. Each guide is creased, folded and slit to create the dual piece. The finished pack is then polywraped and released to Royal Mail each week.
