Booking a holiday is not a one-step process. There’s choosing a destination, deciding whether to go for a hotel, self-catering, or an all-inclusive package deal, researching flights, car rental, tours and activities and more. It’s a multi-day event supported by an ever-increasing number of tabs open on the consumer’s browser as they try to wade through the sea of choices available.
At each of the touchpoints along the path to booking a holiday, travel brands have the opportunity to reach out and connect with the customer on an emotional level with inspirational content that’s eye-catching enough to make a sale. In today’s market, one of the smartest ways to do that is through video.
The role of video both on the web and on social media has exploded in recent years. In fact, the time we spend watching videos has increased by almost 250%* over the past five years, and social video generates 1200%* more shares than text and image content combined. And it’s not just about YouTube and TikTok. According to Social Media Week, users spend 88% more time browsing on websites that have videos.
If your travel brand is not yet harnessing the power of video content to convert travel intenders into customers, now is the time to jump in.
A rainy February morning on the train to work. A social feed filled with balmy beaches and swaying palm trees. Imagine if your customers could book their dream getaway straight from an inspiring video. That’s exactly what Thomas Cook asked Platform 195 to do with their innovative travel booking app designed to immerse customers in rich content to convert directly to sales. And with a reported 64%* of consumers making a purchase after watching branded social videos, it was a huge revenue opportunity.
Platform195 was tasked with curating and creating a library of inspirational video content – with each video linked to a bookable hotel or holiday destination. The team at Platform 195 worked with tourist boards and hotels to source raw content before editing it into inspirational 30-second clips to populate the app. They also started an influencer programme, which resulted in a bank of unique content to be used on the app alongside an extensive word-of-mouth marketing campaign to promote the new app to a wide audience of millennial travellers.
Within three months the app had been populated with over 1,000 pieces of video content available to browse, and the campaign had generated 20,000 app downloads.
For OTA’s (online travel agents), a major challenge is how to make listings capture a user’s attention. After all, the amount of choice available online is staggering. Booking.com has over 28 million accommodation listings, and Expedia.com has over 3 million.
Most online travel agents get their hotel imagery from what’s known as ‘bed banks’; a central repository of images and information that are available to every single OTA in the market. So no matter which travel site a customer visits as they flick between browser tabs, the hotel images are the same. It’s an overcrowded market, and using the same visual content as everyone else makes it harder to capture that sale.
EasyJet Holidays understands the value of differentiating itself from the competition, so it asked Platform 195 to film new, proprietary content at 150 hotels across Europe. The content will be used to drive incremental booking increases, not just versus the competition, but also improving on EasyJet Holidays’ own historical sales. And as businesses with video content earn income 49%* faster than non-video users, the investment is well worthwhile.
Potential customers can also become less price-sensitive when presented with content that they connect with on an emotional level, as the desire to acquire a particular experience overrides the simple question of price. To tap into this key sales driver, Platform 195 also creates libraries of inspirational destination content for EasyJet Holidays that can be used cross-channel, from website to social media to ad placements.
So what can video content do for your travel brand? In short, it can Inspire customers, differentiate your offer from the competition and shorten lead times between the research and booking phases of the customer journey. And by thinking of content in a 360-degree context, video creation becomes a very cost-effective marketing tool to support sales.
Platform 195 has developed a model that allows it to create video content in a cost-effective and scalable way to elevate your brand presence online. If you’d like to find out more about how video can drive real business impact, get in touch today, or check out the Platform 195 Vimeo channel to see some of the content we’ve created recently.
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