Thomas Cook is planning its biggest turn-of-year marketing campaign for many years as it seeks to put its recent financial woes behind it.
Speaking exclusively to Travel Weekly, new marketing director Mike Hoban claimed the campaign would be the sector’s biggest investment in Christmas marketing activity.
Cook’s main rival Tui Travel revealed in September it was spending £5.5 million on promotional activity, split across an autumn and January marketing push.
The Cook campaign will begin on TV, radio, press and in retail shops from Christmas Day.Hoban, who joined Cook in October from Confused.com, said the TV ad would “remind people of the reasons why they know and trust the Thomas Cook name”.
It will be a combination of the “very familiar and very new” with “some innovation and also some things we are famous for”.
He added: “The peaks trading period is a massively important part of the trading calendar and I have been gearing up since I joined to make sure Thomas Cook makes a real splash during that period.”
Hoban, who has previously held senior marketing positions at British Airways, WH Smith and Barclaycard, said the campaign was important to the industry as a whole as well as to Cook.
“We’ve put our troubles behind us. The business is remarkably resilient – customers have put their trust in us and we want to demonstrate that that trust is well placed.”
Looking ahead to next year, Hoban said there would be a focus on multimedia and having a joined-up approach across all channels.
“Consumers shop around and do a
lot of research before making a decision. We want to make sure we’re in all the places the consumer is going to do
that research.
“Today’s world is very different to that which existed 20 years ago; I am keen to make sure we’re talking to consumers in as many different ways as possible.”