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Buy a flight or holiday these days you don’t even get a ticket; you get an email. So how does an online travel agent continue the selling conversation once the customer has printed out their flight-reference-number email and logged off their computer? This was the challenge: make the online brand step into the real world experience of its customers.

Margins on flights are light, making the cross-selling of additional services like hotel stays, care hire, travel insurance and excursions vital to the customer profitability. So the agency created a piece that’s going to get them in the mood for the trip –and deliver additional revenue for ebookers. It gives them a name and contact number to call, not an email address.

It is also a highly personal guide to San Francisco/New York/Dubai/Prague/wherever. Digital print makes it stand out, flatter, get noticed. Everything’s personalised, including the weather (according to season/month). And customers get an oversized throw-out map of town. With their name on it. The database was compiled from recent flight and holiday purchasers through the ebookers.com website.

Eight different destination packs were produced and mailed to customers who has booked flights to those citied/regions.The campaign garnered an overall response rate of 1.48 per cent, which is an 8.7 per cent uplift on previous control.

This piece uses advanced digital print personalisation to stimulate that sense of holiday excitement and anticipation in a way that a flight reference number never will. And to sell like a travel agent never could.

Ebookers.com is an online brand with little preference outside a ‘Favourites List’ to reply upon in ensuring that people come back to them, in that is a very competitive sector. Hence the decision to use personalised direct mail to continue the sell.

In essence, the special thing about this campaign is its relevance. It’s tempting to use digital print just because you can, but that doesn’t mean you should. At its heart, Enjoy Your Trip uses it to present hard-nosed selling as useful and personalised travel information. Judge James Hewlings –executive director of The Lettershop Group –praised the personalisation of the piece. He added: “This is a very clever campaign and definitely something you would take on holiday with you.

Production manager: Robin Murray
Account director: Sarah-Jane Wilkinson
Copywriter: Jim Archer
Art director: Chris Rawlings
Creative partner: Neil Francis