Midcounties Co-operative’s retail travel arm Co-operative Travel is introducing a section on its website dedicated to learning and inspiration following the success of its ‘armchair travel’ social media campaign.
The new zone on cooptravel.couk aims to inspire customers to book holidays for 2021 and includes material such as recipes from around the world, mindfulness colouring sheets, instructions on how to make and fly paper aircraft, and a function to send a virtual postcard to a loved one.
It follows the #armchairtravel series of social media posts, launched as the UK went into lockdown and designed to educate and entertain followers and spark interest in booking holidays for next year.
This uses one post a day on Facebook and Instagram to highlight a destination, attraction, or historic building using travel trips, short videos, 360-degree tours, Google Earth tours, Spotify playlists of local music and books to bring travel to life.
To date the #armchairtravel series has reached 110,000 people on Facebook, a 65% increase in social media engagement since launch.
The highest performing posts, in terms of engagement, have been video tours and educational free tours. The most popular include virtual visits to the Vatican, Buckingham Palace and The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. The destination posts with the most follower engagement so far include Santorini, Kefalonia, Gran Canaria, Peru, Cancun, Reykjavik, Amsterdam, Bora Bora and the Disney parks.
Natalie Turner, head of branches for Co-operative Travel, said: “From the successful engagement with the #armchairtravel campaign we are seeing increased enquires, which in turn is now supporting our business revival strategy moving forward.
“It’s fantastic to see educational virtual tours are proving so popular. We have heard that some parents are using these tours as tools for home schooling, utilising the excellent digital content from museums, historic palaces, world wonders and even the White House in Washington DC.
“We hope the launch of the new section of our website, which will be the home for our educational and mindfulness content, as well as fun activities for all the family, will bring the world closer to our customers and put a smile on their faces during this tough time. We’re pleased to be keeping the spark of interest in travel alive and our colleagues, working from virtual offices at this time, are here when people are ready to book their 2021 getaways.”
