Flight Centre: Shifting perceptions

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Shifting perceptions from cheap flights to holiday delights

Shifting perceptions from cheap flights to holiday delights

Challenge

The common misconception is that Flight Centre has a flight only offering. Their advertising and media choice reflected this, being heavily price-led and in classified alongside flight aggregators. To change these pre-conceptions, we built partnerships with premium publishers to leverage their brand equity across paid placements and editorial content.

What we did

The sphere of influence around their stores was a key focus for our digital activity. In December 2019, we launched the “Put your kids in charge” campaign to counter the established seasonal lull in bookings and increased store visits by 42% year on year.

We introduced Rippll footfall tracking technology so we could gain a greater understanding of how customers engaged with display and OOH media before going in-store to speak to a holiday consultant.

For a tactical campaign with lower budgets, we focussed on premium environments over-indexing versus our core audience such as The Telegraph and The Guardian. Using interactive banner formats, we increased engagement rates by over 15%.

Results

When our target audience was exposed to both display and DOOH activity there was a 51% increase in-store footfall compared to the control group. Every display tactic drove at least a 26% increase in-store footfall.

By repositioning Flight Centre as the tailor-made holiday specialist by overhauling both creative content and the media buying strategy we were able to increase holiday sales in Q1 2019 by 12% resulting in an additional £1.1m in income.