How we solidified Travelist's position on the market and helped emerge from the industry crisis as a stronger player

Travelist is an e-commerce intermediary in the sale of hotel packages, primarily in Poland. Accommodation packages are offered at reduced prices. Couples and families with kids make up the majority of the platform's users. From its beginning, the brand focused primarily on performance activities, media optimization for ROI, and lead monetization.

Results

+109%
Increase in SOM (YoY)
+17%
Increase in the number of leads obtained (YoY)
+17%
Increased spontaneous awareness

Customer opinion

At Travelist, as the first months of the pandemic had passed, we knew we had every advantage to make the most of this challenging situation: a compelling offer of stays in Poland that will become sought-after, an experienced team capable of crafting and promoting the offer so that it benefits both clients and our hotel partners, operational agility, decision-making speed, and an additional incentive in the form of the government's introduction of the Tourist Voucher, in the subject of which we wanted to become an expert and a go-to destination for its implementation. As of today, the decision to play against the collective intuition of the accommodation industry, hit the nail on the head from a business standpoint (not only did we defend the sales scale from the pre-pandemic year of 2019, but in some months we broke our own records and significantly increased our market share), as well as from a team integration perspective (after a few months of lockdown, we were able to revisit to the most beautiful corners of our country to prepare original promotional materials as part of the “Get to know Poland” campaign).
Krzysztof Dębski
Travelist Marketing Director

01.

Challenge

The pandemic is the biggest blow in the history of Polish and world tourism. Tourist traffic falling to almost zero, category leaders reducing employment by 70% and saving themselves from "drowning" by all means - including complete freezing of advertising budgets. The uncertain summer and constant changes in restrictions cast a shadow on the ambitious plans Travelist had for 2020. The challenge was to save summer sales, but we wanted to achieve much more.

We decided to use this difficult period to strengthen Travelist's position on the market and, in the long run, emerge from the industry crisis as a stronger player.

02.

Solution

If you wanna be a leader – start acting like one.

We had two options: withdraw - as virtually the entire category did - or risk increasing activity, take advantage of the temporary lull in competition to emerge from the crisis as a stronger player in terms of penetration, awareness, and ultimately sales,

We chose the first option.

The pillars of communication were the inspirational platform Discover Poland and a strong product offer based on the Tourist Voucher.

Communication media included digital media, TV, as well as own channels (social media, podcasts, Travelist Magazine).

03.

Optimization

MarTech

Continuous optimization of performance activities was based on a number of our proprietary martech tools:

  • Auction Insights – thanks to which we analyzed data from Google Ads and looked for significant changes in competitors' activity.

  • Auction alert – for automatic notification when competition activity deviates from the norm.

  • Budget Monitor – a tool thanks to which we could precisely determine recommended daily expenses.

  • SEM Health monitor – used to check elements that affect the effectiveness of the campaign.

  • Performance Dashboard - an original report with tables and charts for daily analysis of results, aggregating data from all traffic sources, both media, and non-media, on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis and relating to all analogous points in time (YoY, MoM, etc. ).

04.

Optimization

Communication

  • in communication focused on optimizing the bottom of the sales funnel, advertising banners communicated benefits that were key in the pandemic, such as: "hotels with free cancellation", "hotels away from the crowds", "hotels with the possibility of redeeming a Tourist Voucher", etc.

  • preparing in advance for unpredictable situations related to the pandemic - e.g. creating different versions of creatives related to the opening of hotels after periodic lockdowns, so that they can be broadcast immediately

  • changing the communication strategy, TG, and frequency on FB:: leaving only hotels offering free cancellation in dynamic DTA campaigns, extending the remarketing window to 45 days, maximizing reach in the group of people who left their e-mail, adapting budgets and advertising content to the pandemic phase

05.

Optimization

Media strategy

  • full use of functions and tools SEM: new, granular structure for brand and generic campaigns, automatic ads tailored to search content, implementation of a smart bidding strategy, implementation of the Inventory campaign,

  • creating a unique matrix of publishers and targeting mailing databases - optimization of mailings based on the matrix, selection of the best publishers depending on the topic of the creation

  • launching mailing and performance activities through our own affiliate network, which allowed us to maximize results thanks to comprehensive negotiations with partners

  • constantly searching for and testing new publishers and mailing databases allowed us to significantly increase the scale of generated transactions

  • changing the settlement model to a CPC+CPS hybrid allowed the cost of acquiring one transaction to be reduced by 17%

06.

Optimization

Cooperation

  • daily monitoring of expenses, revenues, and ROAS, and analysis down to the lowest level of detail (targeting, creation). Immediate response in a rapidly changing environment

  • working on a detailed schedule of A/B tests carried out in all channels while maintaining the principles of scale and statistical significance. It will draw conclusions from tests, transferring conclusions to other ads and channels

07.

Results and benefits

We achieved all the goals we set for ourselves in various areas for the period June-August 2020 (vs. June-August 2019)

  1. Maintaining sales in the pandemic summer of 2020 compared to 2019 (101% of revenue)

  2. SOM YoY increase (June +109%, July +19%, August +25%)

  3. YoY increase in the number of leads acquired by 17% with a 15% lower CPL

  4. Increase in spontaneous awareness by 17% and assisted awareness by 14%