Travelzoo, the online publisher of exclusive offers and experiences for members, launches a new outdoor campaign to inspire Britons to keep dreaming of and planning for holidays to take after lockdown.
Holidaymakers are facing cancelled plans this summer, and since many of us have extra time on our hands during the current lockdown, the campaign promotes a range of fully refundable UK hotel stays for dates later in the year, as well as international holidays for 2021.
The campaign is built on the insight that despite the devastation of the last three months, our appetite for getting away is still strong. In a recent Travelzoo member survey, 60% said they would book a travel deal right now if it was fully refundable or free to change. The campaign aims to encourage Britons to dream, book and save now, and then travel later, by showcasing that it’s working with partners to provide deals with increased flexibility for travel.
The campaign was created by TMW Unlimited and, unusually for a travel campaign, features no destination-specific imagery, instead playing on those day-dreaming moments we all have at home. The activity will go live on Friday, initially running for two weeks across digital OOH sites in major cities including Birmingham, London and Manchester.
Glyn Owen, head of marketing UK, Travelzoo: “The travel industry has been severely hit by the pandemic so it’s not time to travel, but it is time to dream and plan for the future. We recently returned to publishing travel deals after a break for most of March and April. Our weekly surveys of our member base provided the insight that people were ready to book travel if the offers were refundable or had extra flexibility like ‘no change fees’ for holidays. We used this as the basis for this campaign – emphasising the ‘future’ and ‘refundable’ aspects of our offers.”
Phil Rhodes, creative director at TMW Unlimited: “The best ideas often come from a simple, relatable piece of behaviour – like the mind wandering to the things we’re missing while stuck indoors. It would have been easy to go down the route of acknowledging the crisis with a ‘holidays can wait’ message, but we wanted to do something that was, while still sensitive to the situation, a little more unexpected and hopeful. Given the ultra-short timeframe, we sourced these images from a photographer we’ve worked with before – and they brought the idea to life perfectly.”
Travelzoo appointed TMW Unlimited to its CRM account in August 2019, with the agency running a member engagement programme for the platform’s 4.8 million members in the UK.